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This is no longer news, because the grant was announced on Nov. 16 and the funds were received on Jan. 1, but through an oversight the news never appeared on this blog.  $3.1 million is a major sum for any college or university anywhere in the world.  For Edwardes it is momentous, especially coming from a provincial government in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Below is the news release from the College that formed the basis for news notes in other venues that some readers may have seen – the Feb. 5 story on the Anglican Communion News Service, the echoing Feb. 6 article on Episcopal News Service, the Feb. 22 story in The Church Times of the Church of England, and the March 20 news note in Christian Century:

Edwardes College Peshawar receives $3.1 million grant from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Government in Pakistan

PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Edwardes College, an Anglican-founded undergraduate and graduate institution in Peshawar, the major city in the troubled border region of northwestern Pakistan, has received a $3.1 million development grant from the provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Principal the Rev. Canon Dr. Titus Presler announced.

“This grant of 300 million Pakistani rupees will assist Edwardes with the academic programmes and physical facilities vital to the degree-awarding status that will enhance our educational contribution to the province and the nation,” Presler said.  “Amid the extremist violence of the region, it is heartening that this province in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has expressed such confidence in the higher education offered by a church institution.  Lots of bad news comes from this area, but there is ground for hope.”

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Procession about to begin

For over 60 years All Saints’ Church in the Old City of Peshawar – originally Anglican and now a parish of the ecumenical Church of Pakistan – has organized a predawn procession through the city before dawn on Easter Sunday.

This year was no exception.  Spirits were high as several hundred parishioners gathered at 4am to ready themselves for the outing.  Members of one family were deputed to carry three crosses in the procession.  Leaders had identifying badges.  A pickup truck outfitted with a sound system idled for the “Go” signal.  Candles were distributed to all participants, who included equal numbers of men and women, and as they were lit the church courtyard glowed.

Pastor Ejaz Gill started the procession off with a prayer and several rousing shouts of “Khudawan Yesu Masih ki . . .” with the crowd roaring back the final word “Jai!” – an expression of enthusiasm so that the full slogan means “Victory to the Lord Jesus Christ!” or “Praise to the Lord Jesus Christ!”

Naturally security was part of the preparation as well, and the municipality had provided a considerable detachment of police in bulletproof vests for the occasion – maybe 30-40 officers altogether, with some in front, some along the sides and some behind the procession.

We turned into the darkened narrow streets of the Old City with an ever increasing crowd in full-throated resurrection songs and slogans behind us, candles alight.  A frequent song was “Alleluia! Bolo Yesu zinda ho gaya!” meaning, “Alleluia!  Proclaim that Jesus is alive again!”

At the first station under Kohati Gate, All Saints’ choirmaster and leader of the Easter procession, or jaloos (pronounced jah-LOOSE), for 30 years, read aloud in Urdu Matthew 28.1-10, used as the Easter Vigil gospel around the world, and then commented on it in Pashto – all of this at high volume amplified by the public address system in the back of the pickup truck.  Thus was the Easter Gospel proclaimed and preached at the heart of Muslim Peshawar in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of 2013.

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“Oh, these extra chairs outside the church must be for Easter Sunday,” I said to my companions as we pulled into the compound of All Saints’ Church in the Old City of Peshawar for the noonday Good Friday liturgy.

“No,” was the reply, “these are for today: many people will come today.”  And so it was.  All Saints’ seats 350 people comfortably.  As the clergy party entered I noticed that all the pews were filled and that a number of pews had been taken out.  It soon became clear that they had been removed so that more people could be accommodated.

By the beginning of the First Word from the Cross – for this was a Seven Last Words service – a good deal of the floor space in front of the pews was filled with people sitting on the carpeted floor.  By the Third Word they were up the chancel steps and all the way to the altar rail, and then they began filling in between the altar and the rail.  As a matter of courtesy, most of the later arrivals were women, the men taking up seats outside the church under a tent.

Altogether no fewer than 800 people attended the three-hour service.

“People the world over are setting apart Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter as days of particular devotion,” I said to the congregation as I prepared to preach on the Seventh Word.  “In the West the churches will be full on Easter Sunday.  Many people attend Good Friday services, but the typical church is far from full on this day.

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Meeting in a drenched tent next to the remnant of their church building that was burned by a mob on Day of Love for the Prophet last September 21, the members of St. Paul’s Church in Mardan, a small city east of Peshawar, took up a second collection at the end of their Palm Sunday service yesterday for the victims of the March 9 Badami Bagh riot in Lahore in which the homes of 170 Christian families were put to the torch.

One of the young Christians who accompanied me from Peshawar marveled: “I’ve not heard of a church in Peshawar taking up a collection for the Badami Bagh people, yet here are these Mardan Christians in their tent collecting money to help those suffering in Lahore!”

It was remarkable.  Yet perfectly natural in the dynamics of empathy.  The Christians of Mardan (pronounced Mar-DAHN) had been shocked and traumatized when a procession protesting the video “The Innocence of Muslims” veered out of control, stormed the church compound, and set fire to church, school and staff residences.  So they could identify with the Christians of Badami Bagh when, instigated by a spurious charge of blasphemy, a mob of 3,000 stormed their neighborhood and burned them out.

The emphasis of the Mardan collection was on providing clothing for the dispossessed fellow Christians – which emphasized just how devastating the destruction in Lahore was.  The chair of the church committee read out an impressively long list of parish women who were going to be organizing the effort.

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Fast on the heels of the March 21 enthronement of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury, which made for encouraging news around the world, the Day 1 report from the current meeting of the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion leads with disappointing news of a financial squeeze for important ministries overseen by the Anglican Communion Office.

Secretary General Canon Kenneth Kearon

highlighted the fact that a major issue for the Anglican Communion Office (ACO) is a lack of funding. This, he said, meant that that for a “not negligible amount of time, staff are having to raise money for their own work.”

Canon Kearon made it clear that the work around theological education – that the Anglican Communion Office had facilitated in the past – currently had no funding whatsoever, and therefore no immediate future.

He explained that funding was also part of the thinking about the Anglican Communion’s presence in New York and Geneva for work with the United Nations and other Churches’ and non-governmental organisations’ representatives there.

As the banner of the Anglican Communion website emphasizes, the communion is present in over 165 countries, making it one of the most widely distributed religious affiliations in the world.  Such diffusion calls for coordination and channeling of energies in order to maximize our impact in the wider world, though Anglicans on a global basis, all 80 million of us, are not vertically or hierarchically organized.  Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, the Instruments of Communion have no directive authority but rather exist to guide, consult and coordinate.  Sailing the organizational winds of the 21^st century, the Anglican Communion is a networking entity.

In that light, it is especially unfortunate that funding is falling short for shared initiatives.  The Anglican Communion Office is a small operation to begin with, not a bloated or power-preoccupied bureaucracy.  The physical and personnel infrastructure of St. Andrew’s House in London, where the ACO is located, is more modest than many Episcopal Church diocesan headquarters, and the relatively few funded ministries – Secretary General, Indaba Project, Mission, Theological Education, United Nations Office, Unity Faith and Order, Communications – have very few staff.  Much of the communion’s work is carried out through networks, 13 of them specifically designated on the website, which operate either without staff or with staff they support on their own.

The two ministries Kearon cited as under financial pressure are important.  Theological Education in the Anglican Communion (TEAC) has done salutary work in researching the nature and direction of theological education around the communion, and its recommendations for what constitutes adequate formation are of great help both to established theological colleges and to new fledgling efforts.  Continuing this initiative is essential, especially in view of the theological tensions that the communion has experienced over the past decade.

A particular Anglican gift over the centuries has been engagement with societal issues in the public square, and many Anglican provinces and dioceses have made robust contributions to public policy debates in their settings.  In that perspective, is it not vital that the Anglican Communion as a whole participate in the single most important global public square, which is the United Nations, both in New York and in Geneva?

Fundraising is clearly on Kenneth Kearon’s agenda, as it should be.  But this is a time for parishes, dioceses and provinces that have means – and of course not all do – to step forward proactively with special and continuing financial contributions to ensure that the particular Anglican gifts that we celebrate both internally, as in theological education, and externally, as at the United Nations, are empowered to make an impact.

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“I feel reenergized for my Christian life,” said one participant at the end of today’s Holy Week retreat at Edwardes College in Peshawar.  “I have problems that have been worrying me, but considering the suffering of Jesus has put it into perspective,” said another.  “My spiritual commitment had been going down, but through this retreat I’ve recommitted to truly living a Christian life,” said a third.

Attending the all-day gathering on the Saturday before Palm Sunday were about 45 people, including about 30 students, divided evenly between men and women, with the remainder being faculty, staff and alumni.  For most, this was their first experience of a retreat.

“Before coming I thought 9 to 4 would seem like a long time, and I expected I might become bored,” said one attendee, “but everything was so helpful that the time was wonderful.”  Another person said he had been to church seminars before but never to a retreat, and he found the designated “Silence Alone” times for individual prayer and meditation especially helpful.

Themed “The Journey of Holy Week,” the retreat for the small Christian community of Edwardes, where over 90% of students and faculty are Muslim, was the first to be held that anyone could remember.  It took place in the College Chapel and on the grounds of the Bungalow on a cloudy day with intermittent rain.

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As important as anything in his brief sermon at Canterbury Cathedral yesterday was newly enthroned Archbishop Justin Welby’s opening parenthetical comment on being accompanied to and from the Gospel reading by an enthusiastic group of African singer-drummers.

After wryly noting the cathedral’s power for reverberation, Welby said, “We are an international church.”

The informal logic of his comment was something like this: “Here we are in Canterbury Cathedral, where the customary music, including much of today’s, comes out of the Western classical tradition.  So you may be surprised by the Gospel Procession being accompanied by an African song-and-dance troupe – and by their costumes and leaping about.  Yes, the Anglican Communion arose out of the Church of England, but it has grown far beyond that to include peoples and cultures around the world where often the music and styles of celebration have little to do with the Western tradition.  Today we celebrate that multicultural community of faith.  We are an international church.”

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“We are 27 crew members aboard this flight, and we come from 27 different countries,” an Emirates flight attendant told me on yesterday’s flight between New York and Dubai, the flagship city of the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf.

What made that comment jump out at me was how well those 27 crew members functioned as a team – cooperatively, cordially, cheerfully, effectively.  Promoting particular airlines is not my business, but in fact Emirates is now not only one of the world’s major airlines but one of the best in welcome, service and reliability.

Linguistic diversity naturally comes along with national diversity.  As on every Emirates flight, the purser announced a list: “The languages spoken by our crew members on tonight’s flight include Arabic, English, French, German, Korean, Spanish, Thai, Portuguese, Hindi, Czech, Croatian, Serbian, Italian, Malay, Cantonese and Tagalog.”

That’s 16 languages.  The purser tore off his handwritten list for me at flight’s end. I know it wasn’t exhaustive because the flight attendant I spoke with was Slovakian and Slovak was not on the list.  Probably a number of crew members from different nations shared Arabic, English, French, Spanish or Cantonese as their primary language.  Additional languages mentioned on other flights I’ve been on have been Filipino, Amharic, Swahili, Russian and Mandarin.

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A lyrical observance to celebrate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad was held here at Edwardes about a week ago under the auspices of the College’s Na’at Society, for which the faculty adviser is the head of our Islamic Studies Department.  Na’at is a song composed specifically in praise of Prophet Muhammad, and the practice, instituted in Baghdad during the 11^th Muslim century, is especially popular among Muslims of south Asia.

The festival of the birth of the Prophet, Eid Milaad al-Nabi, was observed as a public holiday in Pakistan on Friday, Jan. 25 (though on Jan. 24 in many other parts of the Muslim world).  The musical observance at Edwardes, called Milaad Sharif, was held a couple of weeks later and was impressive.

The stage in the Edwardes Old Hall Theater was decked out in lovely colors, festooned with rose petals, and adorned with dozens of small oil lamps burning.  That was the festive side.  Among the dozen students seated on the stage with cushions and prepared to sing were several women, one of whom was the emcee for the occasion.

The na’at singing began after an introductory reading from the Qur’an.  Na’at has no accompanying instrumental music, so the singing was all solo voice, with the singer sitting or kneeling in front of a stationary microphone.  Most of the Na’at were in Urdu, a few in Arabic, and one or two in Pashto.

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The killing of over 80 people in a bomb blast targeting Hazara Shia Muslims and claimed by the banned Lashkar-i-Jhangvi in Balochistan’s capital of Quetta over the weekend renewed and extended the travesty of the killing of close to 100 people in two similar blasts in Quetta on January 10.

It also brings to mind the remarkable protest launched by Quetta’s Shia community at that time: They refused to bury the bodies of their loved ones – until the government would do something to assure them that they would be better protected in the future.  Families of men, women and children sat with the coffins of 86 unburied dead for days in the streets of Quetta – right through the nights in bitter cold and sometimes rain.

There are indications that at least some of the bereaved in the latest bombing are attempting the same this time.

Before these events I had never before heard of people protesting deaths by refusing to bury the dead – at any time or anywhere in the world.   Unburied bodies are an especially extreme step for Muslims, who bury their dead within a day.

The deaths and the unburied dead had their effects in January.

“The massacre of Hazaras has bored through the shock absorbers that we refer to as either resilience or apathy,” remarked one news commentator on Jan. 15.  Protests launched all over the country included members of all sects and all religions.  Hazara Shias have been under attack in Balochistan for about ten years, and altogether about 1,100 people have been killed, according to news reports.

The protest of the unburied dead brought down the elected provincial government in the end, and the federal government put the province under the rule of its appointed governor.  The new arrangement unfortunately has not been able to prevent this latest outrage.

Observing the power of the unburied dead in Quetta, a group of tribespeople in Bara, an area of Khyber Agency near Peshawar, adopted the same protest tactic shortly after the January Quetta protest.  After 18 of their people were killed by the army in what they regarded as an unjustified attack on peaceful civilians in the ongoing struggle between the military and insurgents, they brought 15 of the bodies in coffins and laid them out on the driveway to the Governor’s House here in Peshawar.  After initial negotiations, the police forcibly removed the bodies by night, at which the tribesfolk returned and had to be dispersed with tear gas – so we had the gas wafting over the Edwardes campus on the morning of Jan. 17, which naturally led to some student unrest.

Unburied bodies are potent both practically and symbolically.

Practically, we all shrink from the signs of decay, so as a form of protest an unburied body brings time pressure to bear.

Symbolically, the unburied body communicates a singular message about the issue and the protester: “My loved one has died because of your action or inaction.  My loved one and our community have not been protected, and you are responsible.  Behold, here is the evidence of your culpability.  I long to honor my loved one with a proper burial.  It is my religious responsibility, and I am stepping beyond the bounds of my religion by delaying burial.  Yet I make this sacrifice, horrifying as it is, in order to secure justice and prevent further horror.”

Indeed.

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I’m not a Vatican watcher.  I have no particular expertise about the current state of the Roman Catholic Church, though a growing number of family connections with the RCC give me some sense of developments on the ground.  But any Christian, it seems to me, should be interested in the future direction of the world’s largest communion, currently with about 1.2 billion members.  Non-Roman Catholic Christians are not always aware of it, but often their own prayer life, public worship and theology have been affected by the trickle-down of developments in Roman spirituality, liturgy and doctrine, especially in the 20^th century and both before and after Vatican II.

Further, the role of a pope in the contemporary world is without peer.  On one hand, a pope’s role can appear much diminished from the medieval period in Europe, when the pope held temporal as well as spiritual sway and was a force that the monarchs had perforce to reckon with.  Temporal power, however, fundamentally compromised the spiritual role of the office and made popes vulnerable to temporal challenges that could and sometimes did eclipse their spiritual as well as temporal influence.

Today, on the other hand, a pope has no temporal power, but the RCC is distributed far beyond Europe and the West to every corner of the globe.  Moreover, the hierarchical structure of the RCC means that that a pope has extraordinary influence in shaping the church from top to bottom, witness the conservative hue of the next conclave in view of John Paul II’s appointment of 50 cardinals and Benedict XVI’s appointment of 67.  As a friend of mine, a former Roman priest, often says, “Every Roman bishop (or archbishop) is a suffragan bishop” – with theoretically any decision vulnerable to veto from Rome. 

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“My theology: Being created in the image of God means we are created for mission.  Simple as that.”  So says Lauren Stanley in the self-introduction on her blog, which is titled “Go Into the World.”  True to form, Lauren, an Episcopal priest, is living that out yet again, this time to serve on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, where her first services at six congregations will happen tomorrow – Sunday, Feb. 17.

Here’s Lauren’s Jan. 19 e-letter announcing the move:

Dear Beloved:

I am honored, delighted and humbled to announce that I have accepted the call to serve as Priest-in-Charge of the Rosebud West Mission on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota!

I will begin my new ministry there on the first Sunday in Lent, 17 February.

There are six congregations on the Rosebud that I will be serving, some pretty small, but all strong in their desires to remain “church,” to worship God and to serve God’s people.

I will be living in the small town of Mission, S.D., in the rectory known as the Barber House, where clergy and church superintendents have lived for, I believe, more than 100 years. My nephew, Trevor Zack, and I will pack up a truck (I don’t have a slew of stuff) and drive out there 8-12 Feb.

My ministry will be to nourish and strengthen God’s people so that together, we can do all that God is calling us to do among God’s beloved children. (Does that sound vague to some of you? That’s because it is … meaning, we will develop the ministry as we go along. There will be Youth Ministry, Ministry to the Homebound, Ministry to Children, worship services, healing services, teaching, playing, serving, hosting mission groups from around the United States … in other words, enough to keep all of us busy).

There is an Intentional Young Adult Community in Mission, jointly sponsored with the Lutheran Church (ELCA), with two great young adults, Kieran and Mikayla, already in residence. They were my hosts during my five-day visit last week and this, and are wonderful, inspired young people.

While I was out there, I bonded with the people, with the lay leaders, with the Diocesan folks, with the children (there’s a little 18-month-old boy, Brian, who already has celebrated the Eucharist in my arms), and with the grandmothers (I’m going to have many of them). The landscape is rolling hills, with a raw, stark beauty. (And yes, I am well aware that it is cold there, and that there aren’t a lot of trees. But there are SOME trees, and I can learn to adapt to the weather again. I just have to buy LOTS of cold-weather clothing!!)

I know that this is the place to which God is calling me, because God spent all five of my days there telling me that, in every way possible.

When I have new contact information, I will let you know. Until then, my phone number, e-mail and web page remain the same.

Celebrate with me!!!

Love,
Lauren

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley
Episcopal Priest & Missionary

My wife Jane and I first got to know Lauren at an orientation for outgoing Episcopal missionaries that Jane organized as Mission Personnel Officer for the Episcopal Church.  The gathering was held at the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.  It was a marvelous group of about 20 men and women of all ages with a wealth of personal experience and expertise, most of them lay and some ordained, headed out to a wide variety of ministries around the world.

Lauren was a vivid person for all of us.  She had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya and now was headed for Juba, Sudan, where she would be teaching in a Bible College.  Her stories, energy, humor and fearlessness were memorable.  Most remarkable about Lauren, though, is her vision and commitment to mission.  When she says we’re created for mission she truly means it.

We’ve kept in touch over the years, which have included the time in Sudan, followed by more mission service in Haiti in the wake of the earthquake.  We rejoice in Lauren’s response to this new call and to her continuing service as a missionary.  We pray her well.

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We had two services in the Edwardes College Chapel on this Ash Wednesday, one at the regular time of 7:40am before early classes, the other at 1pm for those coming in for afternoon classes.  There was a turnout of about 30 students and faculty at the early service and about 40 in the afternoon – good in a total College Christian population of about 200.

Since many students planned on being in their parishes for congregational services with ashes, we simply used the devotional side of the liturgy of the day, readily available from the Episcopal prayerbooks sent to us by SPCK-USA from All Saints Church in Tupelo, Mississippi, to which we have frequent recourse for Morning Prayer, the other offices and special liturgies such as today’s.  We also use the Church of Pakistan forms for Morning Prayer and Eucharist, but the USAmerican BCP has a generous wealth of material.

For scripture we used today’s epistle, 2 Corinthians 5.20-6.10, for its stress on reconciliation, sorely needed in this part of the world as well as in the lives of all of us as individuals.  Paul’s soaring rhetoric – “through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities . . . by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love . . .” – reminded me of the passionate Urdu and English rhetoric of students in today’s intercollegiate Declamation Contest as students truly declaimed about the trials and tribulations of life in Pakistan today. 

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Amid the assessments and accolades swirling around the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, I note one small but significant fact.  Some people loved Benedict and agreed with him.  Some liked him and did not agree with him.  Some agreed with him but may not have liked him.  Some neither agreed nor liked.  But I note this fact:

Everyone – and I mean everyone, for I have not heard a contrary word from any street or commentator – admires and honors his act of resigning when he felt that his health no longer permitted him to fulfill the office of Pope as he would like, or as he felt God and the church needed.

Moreover, there was not a hint of the resignation announcement before it occurred.  No rumors in Rome.  No attention-attracting gossip in the household.  No knowledgeable Vatican watchers, not even friends of the Pope, had any notion that this was in the offing.  It seems that the Pope discussed it only with his older brother, who obviously justified his trust.

So when Benedict spoke of repeatedly examining his conscience before God we believe him.  His resignation decision is clearly an act of honesty, faithfulness and integrity.  Both the resignation itself and the private manner with which it was undertaken express exemplary humility.

Given almost two millennia of lifetime tenure in the ministry of Pope – with no resignations undertaken previously as an individual decision for reasons of health – the resignation is a major departure.  The fact that it was undertaken purely in personal prayer, with no preceding scuttlebutt or public debate about it, seals it in authenticity.  It also makes it more likely to set a precedent for future Popes.

We have to go back a ways to locate an act by a public figure that has been so universally admired and honored.  Two come to mind: the work of Desmond Tutu in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and, before that, the work of Nelson Mandela in undertaking the presidency of South Africa in a genuine spirit of reconciliation.  Even those two works, however, had their critics who felt that perpetrators of violence during apartheid got off too lightly, whether from the ANC government or from the TRC.

Too often in recent history we have been disappointed by the final acts of public figures, or acts a ways back that then come to light in ways that tarnish or shame the burnished reputation.

Benedict XVI’s resignation has no critics, only admirers.  It will rank among the significant acts of his pontificate.  It is good that it comes from the leader of the world’s largest group of Christians.

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On the Third Sunday after Epiphany, Jan. 27, I preached at All Saints’ Church at Kohati Gate in the heart of Kocha Sarafa Bazaar in the old city of Peshawar.  Kocha is an area of antique narrow streets with scores of splendiferous cloth shops teaming with men and burqa-clad women looking for the best bargains.  Going back about 2,000 years as the first major settlement on the east side of the Khyber Pass, Peshawar is an ancient city.  All Saints’ has been at its center since 1883, and a Shia imambargah ministers across the street from it.

The story of Moses’ request of God at Exodus 33.12-23 to see God’s very self during his second sojourn on Mount Sinai was the Old Testament lesson for the day, the other lessons being the introduction to John’s First Letter (1.1-7) and the story of the wedding in Cana in Galilee in John’s Gospel (2.1-11).  All three highlight epiphanies of various kinds but I focused on Moses’ longing to see God on the mountain.

I’ve always been drawn to this story but until now but had never preached on it because it never came up in a lectionary!  Moses wants to see God’s glory (the shekinah), which God in this instance takes as being equivalent to seeing God’s face, which no human can see and live.  But God has a counter proposal:

While my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by: then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.

That’s the arresting image – seeing the back of God.  Our longing for God.  Our delight in whatever disclosures we have of God.  Yet our knowing that the disclosures are only partial, so our longing continues unabated.  As Paul says to the Corinthians, “Now we see as through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face.”

Seeing God’s back, not God’s face.  Cannot this recognition of the incompleteness of our knowledge of God be a starting point for conversation between people who faith* in God in different ways?

Moses is important in Islam as well as in Judaism and Christianity, and Moses is mentioned more often than any other figure in the Qur’an.  “To Moses God spoke directly,” states Sura 4:164.  At Sura 19:51-52 we hear:

Mention too, in the Qur’an, the story of Moses.  He was specially chosen, a messenger and a prophet: We called to him from the right-hand side of the mountain and brought him close to Us in secret communion.