PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2004-01-12 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Allah or Jesus? (id)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • The piece quoted above (Allah or Jesus?) is an editorial penned by Rick Mathes, Executive Director of the Mission Gate Prison Ministry. We asked Mr. Mathes if he could provide some information about the origins of the piece, and he responded: Reporter Greg Kearney, writing for the Lee News Service, traced the story to a correctional facility in Fulton, Missouri, and came away with a decidedly different version of events from Missouri state officials. According to Tim Kniest, Public Information Officer for the Missouri Department of Corrections, the event described was a training program for prison volunteers, for which ministers from several faiths were invited to give presentations in order to acquaint prison volunteers with the varied religious beliefs of the inmate population. The man who gave the presentation about Islam was not a Muslim minister; he was an inmate pressed into service to present a short film on Islam and answer some questions when the prison's Volunteer Coordinator was unable to find an Imam to speak. Moreover, reported Mr. Kniest, the prison's Volunteer Coordinator said that The inmate did a good job, adding, He was asked a few questions that were beyond his ability to answer. But he was not asked anything like that question [in the editorial]: Regardless of whatever may have transpired at the prison training session referred to above, the larger point the writer is attempting to make in this piece is a grossly inaccurate one. Islam is not a monolithic religion in which unanimity of belief and action is coordinated from a central authority; it has well over a billion adherents in countries all over the world who belong to any one of a number of different sects with varying beliefs, traditions, and interpretations of scripture. (As well, some religious groups identify themselves as Islamic but are not recognized as such by the vast majority of Muslims.) No one Muslim (especially one who wasn't even a cleric) could speak to what all of Islam believes, any more than a single member of a Methodist congregation could speak for every denomination and follower of Christianity. As National Geographic reporter Frank Viviano found during extensive travels through the region, even in Saudi Arabia, the heart of Islam, Muslims were far from holding the idea that All followers of Allah have been commanded to kill everyone who is not Muslim — even the notion that other religions should be barred from the home of Islam was disputed: If one is willing to ignore history, context, and actual practice when quoting scripture and other religious texts, followers of just about any religion can be painted as uniformly fanatic and intolerant. By presenting misinterpretations and fringe activities as the norm, one could claim that mainstream Christianity tolerates or promotes child molestation and stoning and could recast the piece quoted above as follows: (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url