A British schoolteacher in Khartoum, whose class of 6 & 7 year olds voted to name a teddy bear Mohammed, was arrested, jailed, and threatened with beheading. While Mohammed is a common name, the fact that the kids applied it to a toy animal was looked on by certain elements as an insult to the founder of the Islamic religion. Muslim MPs from London flew to Sudan and managed to get the terrified woman released and permitted to return to England. She had made A Cultural Mistake.
Some expressions of religion are downright toxic. Riots broke out a few years ago when a Danish newspaper published a cartoon of Mohammed. And in present-day Iraq, Christians must worship in secret or face the possibility of being killed.
The point is sometime made that it is only the more fanatical Muslims who are the Terrorists, but where are their critics in moderate Islamic circles? Has the cat got their tongue? There seems to be a built-in reluctance for an Islamic to be critical of one’s co- religionists.
Here in America, inter-faith relations have not always been pacific. In colonial times, for instance, the Baptist Roger Williams was driven out of Calvinistic Massachusetts to Rhode Island. And the influx of Russian and Polish Jews was not universally welcomed, as also was the case with Roman Catholics in the aftermath of the failure of the potato crop in Ireland in the 1840s. But as time passed, religion in America has been homogenized, so to speak. We all get along well with one another, and ecumenical services are a commonplace.
Not homogenized, however, are American Islamics. Is there something innately separatist, exclusionary and expansionist in Mohammed’s modern disciples’ mind-set? It is to be remembered that a bare century after his life, Muslim armies advanced to within a few miles of Paris. being stopped in AD-732 at the Battle of Tours by Charles Martel, known to history as The Hammer. Had the battle been lost, Europe might well have been Islamized, and eventually so would the United States of America.
Until recently, the Western World has not been concerned with Islam. But no longer. With Europe facing a labor shortage, huge numbers of Turkish and other Muslims workers have arrived to fill vacant jobs. And Europe has drifted away from its Christian foundation and heritage.
Nature abhors a vacuum – and one doesn’t have to be prescient to see what lies ahead. While Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews have learned to co-exist in peace and even friendship, it does not appear that Mohammedans are able to do the same. CWB+
