Nation of Islam

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This keeps making news: Why do images of Prophet Muhammad so deeply offend Muslims?

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This keeps making news: Why do images of Prophet Muhammad so deeply offend Muslims?

THE QUESTION:

Why do images of the Prophet Muhammad so deeply offend Muslims?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

This issue has erupted unexpectedly at Methodist-related Hamline University in Minnesota. Last October, adjunct art teacher Erika Lopez Prater showed an online class two medieval paintings in which pious Muslims had portrayed the Prophet Muhammad receiving Quran revelations from the angel Gabriel.

Lopez Prater warned Muslim students in advance so they could avert thir eyes. Nonetheless, the president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) complained that Lopez Prater’s “trigger warning” itself showed she had committed an offense against Islam. Hamline’s President Fayneese Miller called Lopez Prater’s deed “Islamophobic” (she later apologized for that word) and the school decided not to renew the teacher’s contract.

The faculty, alarmed over academic freedom, called January 24 for Miller’s resignation in a lopsided 71 – 12 vote of no confidence. Then in response to that response, 13 leaders from campus groups like the MSA, Student Congress, and diversity committee endorsed Miller’s leadership and accused the faculty of betraying students.

Meanwhile, Lopez Prater is suing the university for defamation and religious discrimination.

Christiane Gruber, a well-known professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, entered the fray to defend and explain her Hamline colleague’s classroom behavior in this article at TheConversation.com.

Whatever current scruples, Gruber said, Muslim artists centuries ago did in fact depict Muhammad and both Muslim and non-Muslim art historians regularly teach about this. Paintings of Muhammad are collected at Istanbul’s renowned Topkapi Palace Library, among other places.


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A rabbi (who belongs on your sources list) unpacks info on Orthodoxy and Zionism

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A rabbi (who belongs on your sources list) unpacks info on Orthodoxy and Zionism

One of the oddest incidents during The Religion Guy’s decades on the beat was an annual Nation of Islam rally in Chicago led by Minister Louis Farrakhan (who was notably entangled with President Barack Obama’s former United Church of Christ pastor).

The oddity was that Farrakhan, America’s most prominent anti-Semite, invited Jewish rabbis to speak.

Not routine rabbis, of course, but spokesmen for Neturei Karta of Monsey, NY, a fierce faction of Orthodox Jews that condemns Zionism as “heresy” and accuses Israel of committing “aggression against all peoples.”

Orthodox Judaism’s traditional opposition to Zionism was a theme in Chaim Potok’s beloved 1967 novel “The Chosen” (a must-read for religion writers of all kinds). Potok depicted a friendship after World War Two between two Orthodox boys, the son of an ardent Zionist educator, and the heir to a Hasidic dynasty opposed to establishment of modern Israel.    

Reporters on foreign affairs, politics, and religion should be aware of Rabbi Shalom Carmy of Yeshiva University, whose latest column for the interfaith journal First Things discusses Orthodoxy and Zionism.  If not there already, carmy@yu.edu  belongs on your prime source list, since Orthodoxy is trickier to cover than Judaism’s other branches.   

Carmy makes a key point: “Secular journalists typically ascribe pockets of rigorously Orthodox antagonism to Zionism to the belief that Jews will only govern themselves in the land of Israel when the Messiah comes.”

That’s true for some Hasidic groups, he says. But historically, the rest of Orthodoxy had a different objection.


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Alabama Muslims: Feature on converts doesn't ask many (or any) follow-up questions

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Confession time: I used to write stories almost as wide-eyed as yesterday's feature on Muslim converts in Alabama.

I wrote up Muslim criticisms of Christianity. I retold their feelings about baleful attitudes from other Americans. I did, however, try to look critically at their claims of up to seven million believers in the U.S.

But see, it's two decades later, and mainstream media should have moved on. And I suggest that the Alabama Media Group, with seven regional editions, carries a heavy responsibility for perceptive reporting, not just writing up notes.

This particular article starts as a sensitive, detail-rich feature of the Alabaman Muslims: how they live, how they view presidential candidates, how they think other Americans view them. Al.com even finds a counter-intuitive lede:

Allie Larbi sounds like a Donald Trump supporter.
The Mobile resident supports building a giant wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and scrapping birthright citizenship. Syrian refugees, in her own words, should either be blocked from entering the United States or let in only to be housed in isolated refugee camps.
"I have what I like to turn around and call American views," said Larbi. "This is a great country and it needs to stay that way."

Larbi naturally takes offense at some of Trump's other statements, like "mandatory registration for Muslims, a ban on Muslim travel to the United States, or shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pig's blood."  We'll get back to her in a moment.


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Another press perplexity: So who speaks for Muslims in the United States?

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Another press perplexity: So who speaks for Muslims in the United States?

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is an awkwardly but accurately named alliance formed in 1955 to give the nation’s variegated Jews a united voice on key matters. Reportedly the Eisenhower White House either originated or promoted the idea of an umbrella group to make life simpler for everybody. The New York City-based conference encompasses 55 groups, communal, political and religious, and pretty much includes all sectors of Jewish life except the stricter forms of Orthodoxy, Hasidism and the anti-Zionist sects.

With less media notice than it deserves, a similar U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations was established in Washington, D.C., in 2014 with a constituency of 19 religious and communal groups.

At the moment, USCMO is no place for busy reporters to do their one-stop shopping to obtain quick, representative quotes and handy background info. However, if it can consolidate support this is certainly an organization to watch. USCMO says its purposes are “to build an active, integrated American Muslim community,” to “speak with one clear, communal voice” and to “support a national agenda for the entire Muslim community.”

These are tall orders given the numerous ethnicities and fiefdoms.

Founders include the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Circle of North America, Muslim American Society and The Mosque Cares, led by W. Deen Mohammed II, who is USCMO’s treasurer. Absent are factions seen as heterodox like the Ahmadiyyas, Moorish Science and Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, which embraces the black nationalism of Mohammed’s grandfather. The prominent Islamic Society of North America is not affiliated but has joined USCMO events. The list looks to be stronger on Sunni than Shi’a and Sufi representation.


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When Worlds Collide II: Scientology and the Nation of Islam

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The 25 October 2012 issue of The New Republic carries a story entitled “Thetans and Bowties” that I can’t quite get my head round. By this I do not mean I do not understand what the article says – but I am having a hard time classifying its species.


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