Why, oh why, must all religion stories be told through the prism of politics?

It really gets tiring. For instance, there was this Washington Post piece last Sunday about how Pat Robertson had said something intemperate (I know! Stop the presses!) about Islam that reflected poorly on Virginia Governor-elect Bob McDonnell. Robertson hadn’t made the comments with McDonnell or at a McDonnell event or in McDonnell campaign literature or anything like that. But he was a big donor to McDonnell’s campaign and McDonnell attended a graduate school affiliated with Robertson and so the Post argued that he might have to respond to the remarks.

The story was published in another context, which is that the Post worked hard during the campaign to tarnish McDonnell, a Republican, as a particularly bad social conservative. Unfortunately for them, he won in an 18-point landslide over his Democratic opponent. But if the Post is going to start paying attention to the controversial affiliations of politicians, it’s a good thing for everyone.

Okay, so CNN now picks up the story and we get this update, headlined “McDonnell won’t disavow Robertson’s Islam remarks”:

Virginia Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell on Wednesday would not disavow Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson’s recent claim that Islam is not a religion, but “a violent political system.”

So McDonnell agrees with Robertson? Or, at the very least, doesn’t disagree with him that Islam is not a religion but a violent political system? Well, not exactly. Here are the final two paragraphs of the story:

When asked if he believes Islam is “a violent political system,” McDonnell said no, but he did not condemn Robertson.

“I think that there are people in various religions that do some violent things and they should be judged according to their acts,” he explained. “But I have believed that there are people of all the great religions, that can be enormously helpful in our multicultural Virginia to help them to benefit us in the state.”

To disavow means to claim no knowledge of, no connection to or no responsibility for something. Or it can mean to disown something or someone. Precisely no one attributed the remark to McDonnell or said he had responsibility for it or that he owned Robertson. To disavow can also mean to repudiate. When asked about his view of Robertson’s remarks, McDonnell did repudiate them as untrue.

So I think that what the author of the story is going for is in that next to last paragraph: McDonnell didn’t condemn Robertson. Which is true. But the headline and lede to this story are sensational rather than informative.

It might also be worthwhile, I suppose, to look into Robertson’s comments in context. He really does say some unbelievably stupid and offensive things (to my ears, at least), but he’s also frequently taken out of context. I liken it to the 1999 Falwell Teletubby issue. Remember how Jerry Falwell was roundly condemned for supposedly saying that Tinky Winky was gay? He never said it, although a journal published by his ministry did contain an article alleging that the character had become a gay role model. But for the previous two years, the same claim had been made everywhere from CNN to the Washington Post to the Village Voice. But rather than have a discussion about how some members of the gay community had embraced Tinky Winky as a role model, or, I suppose, to point out that Falwell’s group had gotten the idea from the media, instead everyone mocked Falwell.

Likewise, rather than have a real discussion about Robertson’s views of Islam or its violence, instead the media use his remarks as a cudgel to attack McDonnell.

Now, Robertson’s comments about Islam not being a religion are offensive and untrue. And I think it’s somewhat ironic that Robertson, of all people, might accuse a religion of being a political system without considering how much his own doctrinal approach emphasizes politics. But there is a real discussion to be had about the violence associated with some groups and movements within Islam and the political systems that arise in Muslim-dominated countries and how these things compare with Christianity and Christian-dominated countries.

That conversation is not being had in the mainstream media. In fact, it almost seems to be suppressed. Of course, it does take some courage to have these discussions and you can’t do it as well when you’re playing gotcha with politicians.

What do you think, what do you feel, when you hear this name — John Allen Muhammad?

If you live in the Washington, D.C., area, the name calls back a stunning array of emotions and images. The sniper siege made ordinary people — with good reason — afraid to pump gas, to take children to school, to wait for a bus and a host of other everyday tasks.

Now that you’ve heard the name, let me ask another question: Based on what you remember about the mainstream media coverage, what do you know about the sniper’s motives? In other words, why did he do it?

Well, while the rest of the nation was struggling to grasp the “why” in the “who, what, when, where, why and how” of Fort Hood, folks inside the Beltway were wrestling with their thoughts and emotions about the execution of Muhammad. It was hard not to to link the two somehow, whether that linkage is valid or not. That’s my point. The cases have little or nothing to do with one another, few if any connecting themes, but how would you know that?

Why did he do it? In one execution story, the Washington Post notes:

What did it teach us? What did we learn from that awful autumn?

Not much, says Police Chief Charlie T. Deane of Prince William County, where Dean H. Meyers, 53, stepped from his Mazda at a Sunoco on Oct. 9, 2002, and was felled by a bullet to the head — the ninth of 13 victims shot that month, the seventh of 10 who were killed.

“The sad thing is, the biggest lesson from this is that two fools with a rifle can put an entire region of the country in a state of absolute fear,” Deane says.

It might have been anyone in the cross hairs of that .223-caliber Bushmaster in those 22 days and nights when millions cowered from a roving, unseen menace — when ballfields and school yards fell still; jittery motorists squatted like baseball catchers to fill their gas tanks; ubiquitous white box trucks loomed suspicious. …

The stalkers were elusive; the attacks, indiscriminate.

What did the attacks mean to Muhammad? Why did he think that he did what he did?

That’s where the problems began, for the mainstream press. I have always been troubled that reporters were afraid to discuss the sniper’s name and his faith.

Why?

This week, James Taranto summed up my concerns perfectly in one of his “Best of the Web Today” essays at the Wall Street Journal. Click here to read that, with lots of helpful links.

Here’s the bottom line: Reporters needed to talk about the precise nature of Muhammad’s faith in order to separate him from mainstream Muslims. It was terrible, cruel even, to leave readers with his name and his evil acts and say, “That’s that.”

Here’s a chunk of what Taranto had to say, while thinking about press coverage of the sniper and then Fort Hood:

We got to thinking about the similarities with the Fort Hood story — but then we went back and read some of the contemporaneous coverage of Muhammad’s crimes and were struck by the differences.

For one, although Muhammad and Fort Hood suspect Nidal Hasan were both Muslims, Muhammad was a convert who had joined the Nation of Islam, an eccentric American sect that focuses on racial (black) rather than religious supremacy. Most of the reports on Muhammad’s execution omit the Nation of Islam connection, leaving the impression, among those who’ve forgotten it, that Muhammad is just another Muslim. …

“I am God,” unlike Hasan’s reported exclamation, “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”), is not something that Muslims normally say. Yet although the connection between Muhammad’s religion and his crimes was much less clear than appears to be the case at Fort Hood, our cursory review of the 2002 press coverage suggests that reporters back then … were more straightforward in dealing with it. And although Muhammad was a veteran — and had, unlike Hasan, actually seen combat — journalists do not seem to have rushed to fit the story to the usual crazy-veteran narrative, as they have been doing with Hasan.

Some have detected in the Fort Hood coverage a return to a pre-9/11 mindset, and there is some truth to this. In particular, the left-liberal tendency to stereotype servicemen and veterans as psychopaths, suckers and victims is a return to form. But the bending over backward to explain away the role of religious fanaticism in the Fort Hood massacre is, it seems to us, something new — something distinctly post-9/11, or post-post-9/11.

In other words, a lack of press information about the beliefs of these men is not good for mainstream Muslims. In order to separate these men and their beliefs from those of other Muslims, one must be willing to discuss those beliefs in factual terms, to the degree that this is possible. It’s impossible, in the long run, to defend the beliefs and lives of mainstream Muslims without discussing Islam and the conflicts inside that complex, global faith — even if that means talking about the Nation of Islam and how its non-mainstream beliefs may or may not have affected someone like Muhammad.

Silence does not help. Ignorance does not protect anyone.

Let me ask the journalists and academics who read this blog: Does that make sense?

Morning Joe is Joe Scarborough’s morning talk show on MSNBC. In the segment above, he discusses media treatment of the role religion played in the Ft. Hood shootings. It begins with a clip from the previous day’s show of the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn decrying the focus on Major Nidal Hasan’s religious views (my transcript):

QUINN: This is the problem. He clearly had serious problems and, you know, he could have been a doctor. You could have said, “Well, a doctor killed all these people,” or “A disgruntled military man killed a lot of people.”

I mean, the fact is that part of it was that he was Muslim, that he was disaffected, that there is an incredible amount of harassment in the military that’s going on toward people who are religious minorities or atheists, and that’s condoned by the military.

Quinn’s career never really ceases to amaze me but the fact is that she represents a viewpoint held by many in the mainstream media. To counter Quinn’s views, we next hear from Irshad Manji, an NYU professor and Muslim who has written a book titled “The Trouble With Islam Today.” Manji had written a column in Toronto’s Globe & Mail arguing that Hasan’s Muslim identity matters and should be analyzed instead of whitewashed:

MANJI: Understanding requires analyzing, not sanitizing. I’m not interested in hysteria. It’s clear that we have to be careful not to reduce this story to Islam but the corrective to that is not to whitewash Islam from public discussion of the story altogether. It’s to put the role of religious conviction in its proper perspective. And by the way, we won’t know what that proper perspective is until all the details have come in. But in and among those details has to be the detail that Major Hasan visited radical Islamist web sites, that he had email exchanges with an extremist preacher, that he reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” before he opened fire on comrades, that he told fellow community members that he did not wish to fight fellow Muslims. So my point simply is that this is a complex case but complexity is not served by, you know, excising certain factors out of the equation merely because you’re uncomfortable with them.

We’ve seen stories that attempt to explain Hasan’s actions as being motivated by mental health problems rather than religious views. But we also have a solid percentage of stories being written where reporters are doing painstaking research and connecting dots that include heavy doses of discussion of religion.

The Morning Joe team discusses a Canadian incident where police busted up a terror plot involving nearly 20 young Muslim men who claimed to have been motivated by religious views. But the police didn’t mention Islam or Muslim in their press conferences and even bragged about avoiding those terms. Manji suggests that this approach doesn’t serve or protect the public. Scarborough mentions that in the Hasan case, some avoided mentioning his name on air.

At this point, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham chimes in with his take:

MEACHAM: Here’s, for what it’s worth, here’s what I think: I think the president was right to say don’t jump to conclusions. We can now at least sort of hop up to one. And it is that this is an act of terrorism committed by someone — clearly a Muslim, clearly influenced to some extent, we don’t know yet what, by radical Islam. Let’s call it what it is. It is an act of terror, which is part of what we’ve been struggling with now for nearly a decade. In the same way, to some extent, now I would not refer to it as Islamic terror in the same way I would not call Oklahoma City Christian terror.

But there is no doubt that Timothy McVeigh — and I am a Christian — there is no doubt that Timothy McVeigh was affected by the warped edges of a white supremacist ideology that was informed to some extent and to some degree by antisemitism and that part of the world. So I wouldn’t shy away from it. It does a disservice to the people who fell.

Now I appreciate what Meacham is attempting to argue. Or what I think he’s attempting to argue. I think he’s saying that Islam as Islam does not necessarily lead to terror.

But equating Timothy McVeigh’s motivation — which was extreme hatred of the federal government — with Christianity just boggles the mind. Anyone who has read the views of McVeigh — and yes, I realize this was some time ago, but they’re readily available online — would know that he rarely discussed religion. And when he did, he did not indicate any motivation at all coming from religion.

Even though the attack on Ft. Hood is just a week old, we already have quite a bit of indication about Hasan’s religious views playing a role. You can’t get his former classmates or colleagues to stop talking about it and it’s pretty apparent that the military and FBI mishandled the clear signals he was sending about his religious views.

Yes, both Timothy McVeigh and Nidal Hasan killed people (or, I should say, Hasan is alleged to have killed people). But not all mass murderers are the same.

For those curious about McVeigh’s views, I recommend “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing.” Written by two journalists who corresponded with and covered McVeigh’s trial and execution, the book describes McVeigh as having somewhat complicated views, but the takeaway is probably best summarized by his quote “Science is my religion.” He was raised and even confirmed Catholic. But the book also describes him as avoiding worship while in the military, once visiting a Seventh Day Adventist congregation and finding it boring, and claiming that he lost touch with religion. Again, this does not sound like the Christian equivalent of one Major Hasan.

Time magazine interviewed him about his religious views and he said he wasn’t terribly religious but did believe in a God. Shortly before he was executed, he accepted an offer to receive last rites from a priest. But he also sent a letter to the Buffalo News where he described himself as an agnostic but said he would “improvise, adapt and overcome”, if it turned out there was an afterlife. Here’s how Dan Herbeck, one of the Buffalo News reporters, explained it it in an interview with ABC’s Sam Donaldson:

HERBECK Well, he is an agnostic. He doesn’t believe in God, but he has told us he doesn’t not believe in God. Death is part of his adventure, as he describes it to us. And he told us that when he finds out if there is an afterlife, he will improvise, adapt and overcome just like they taught him in the Army.

There’s a reason why Jon Meacham would not refer to the Oklahoma City bombing as Christian terror — it wasn’t. And it’s time for folks to stop rewriting history to make it so.

I’m preparing to do a larger post looking at the two distinct ways that the mainstream media have been covering the story of the shooting at Fort Hood — either viewing religion as a major aspect of the shooter’s motivation or working overtime to avoid considering religion as a major aspect. In my research, I came across this CNN interview of a private who was wounded during the attack. It’s an interesting video interview that was written up for CNN.com. Here’s how the write-up of the interview begins:

Fort Hood, Texas (CNN) — Pvt. Joseph Foster was filling out routine paperwork for his upcoming deployment to Afghanistan on Thursday when he heard a shout quickly followed by a burst of gunfire from just a few feet away.

“I was sitting in about the second row back when the assailant stood up and yelled ‘Allahu akbar’ in Arabic and he opened fire,” Foster said Monday on CNN’s “American Morning.”

Foster, 21, said he wasn’t clear about whether the gunman said those exact words, noting that “with that much adrenaline, you tend to forget things.”

The only problem is that Foster didn’t say he was unclear about whether the gunman said those exact words. Maybe two minutes after he describes the ‘Allahu akbar’ shout, interviewer John Roberts, asks him if he didn’t realize he’d been shot. He responds that he realized it when it happened but “with that much adrenaline, you tend to forget things.”

Before one can understand the religious aspects of this story, journalists need to just get the facts straight.

I should note that a separate story on the CNN.com site does not make the same error. That story, which you can read here, changes the name of the private from Joseph to Robert. Not sure what the story is there.

I was on a flight from Baltimore to the West Coast early this week and ended up sitting next to a young Muslim who was originally from Kenya. However, as soon as he came to the United States he joined the U.S. Army as a way to obtain funds to go to college. He spent most of his years in military service in Korea.

I was reading some New Republic coverage of events in Afghanistan and he noticed that and started a conversation. As you would imagine, it didn’t take long for this to evolve into a discussion of issues linked to the Fort Hood massacre. He was stunned and appalled, but not completely surprised.

In our conversation, he kept returning to two points. First of all, serving in the U.S. military raises a wide range of issues for Muslims and, here is the crucial point, Muslims simply do not agree on how to deal with these issues. Again, there is no one Islam. Some Muslims will have few difficulties meshing into the military. For others, it will be all but impossible. What’s the key factor? That was his second point. There is no way to discuss this without being informed and honest about the wide range of doctrines and beliefs in Islam and how different groups of Muslims interpret them. These tensions are tremendous, he said, often leading to striking displays of Muslim vs. Muslim prejudice.

U.S. officials (put journalists into this scene as well) are simply going to have to be very careful and take these doctrinal issues seriously, he said. They must find out what Muslims truly believe, if they are to serve in the U.S. military. Again, some Muslims fit. Some do not. Doctrine is the key factor in this.

But, I said, how do military officials (1) know Muslims are telling the truth? And (2) ask these kinds of highly personal, probing questions without violating, well, the separation of church/mosque/synagogue and state, without singling Muslims out for unique discrimination? He did not have an answer for that. Neither did I.

For a glimpse of how all of this affects the Fort Hood story, check out this new Washington Post report by Michelle Boorstein. Here’s the top:

U.S. Muslim service members say they stand out in both their worlds.

Among fellow troops, that can mean facing ethnic taunts, awkward questions about spiritual practices and a structure that is not set up to accommodate their worship. Among Muslims, the questions can be more profound: How can a Muslim participate in killing other Muslims in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan?

Just 3,557 members of the 1.4 million-member U.S. armed forces describe themselves as Muslim, and followers of Islam said the military is just starting to accommodate them by recruiting Muslim chaplains, creating Muslim prayer spaces and educating other troops about Islam.

There it is, in the second paragraph. That’s one of the doctrinal issues that this Muslim man and I discussed during the flight. Simply stated, Muslims disagree on how to answer that life-and-death question. Also, there is a good chance that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan had one set of beliefs about that doctrinal issue when he entered the military and another when he purchased his handguns and began planning his ambush on his fellow soldiers.

There are other questions: Must Muslims actively attempt to win converts? What about serving with and under the command of women? Can Muslims serve in some parts of the world and not others? How do members of the military find the line between debating religious issues (such as those that may be seen as affecting U.S. policies in the Middle East) and using these debates as a way to express prejudice? That question affects people on both sides of this divide, including clashes between Muslims who have different beliefs.

These issues loom over the story and deserve more attention. Here’s another glimpse of the terrain:

Saleem Abdul-Mateen, a Washington native who was in aviation electronics in the Navy from 1975 to 1995 and is a national leader of a veterans group, said he straddles two worlds. “Today, a [Muslim] brother said to me, ‘You know, if we’re about peace, why are we fighting another country?’ And that’s valid. But you have to support the country when it’s right and when it’s wrong,” Abdul-Mateen said.

Doug Burpee, who took the call name “hajji” as a helicopter pilot, said he “never had a problem in 26 years.” Although he loves to engage in academic discussions about religion, he said, he kept his prayer invisible and thinks that Muslim service members, like others, have to compromise to fit into military life.

“There are Muslims who stop in their footprints to pray, and those people might have a problem,” he said. “But if you’re going to join — join. If Muslims don’t fit in, it’s their fault.”

This is a solid story, as a starting point. Let’s hope that journalists see these questions and take them seriously. The government may have legal problems attempting to explore these issues. There’s no reason that journalists cannot take them seriously.

We’re still learning a lot about Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, though I doubt his Muslim beliefs were, as reported by NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling this morning, “orthodox.” I know more than a few traditionally observant Muslims who would dispute that.

News coverage now, though, has primarily shifted to questioning just what U.S. intelligence officials knew about Hasan before he allegedly went berzerker at Fort Hood last week and why nothing was done to preempt him.

The writing was on the wall, it seems — and in a PowerPoint presentation to senior Army physicians. (This story from The Washington Post, complete with PowerPoint slideshow, is definitely worth reading.) Turns out investigators had turned an eye to Hasan more than a year ago when they learned he was communicating with the former imam of the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va.

That imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, a “radical American” now living in Yemen, is praising Hasan as a hero:

“Nidal Hassan [sic] is a hero,” Awlaki said. “He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

Here we see a reference to that belief mentioned in my post Friday — that Muslims can’t fight alongside Christians and Jews and against fellow Muslims. But, still, the statement isn’t supported or undercut by the Koran. It’s just put out there.

Again, a story about religion without much discussion of religion. (The Los Angeles Times didn’t fare much better.)

The Washington Post, using an alternative spelling for Awlaki, got closer yesterday to getting into the religious meat of this story:

A challenge for investigators is sorting out a potential thicket of psychological, ideological or religious motivations behind Hasan’s alleged actions. Hasan’s possible contact with extremists such as Aulaqi would complicate matters, suggesting that U.S. authorities may have missed chances to prevent the cleric from instigating this incident and others. But if it turns out that Hasan acted in the throes of an emotional breakdown, his questionable ties could be misinterpreted in ways that damage U.S. outreach to the Muslim world or provoke an overreaction that divides Americans.

“There’s a massive effort here to look at the Web sites he visited,” the law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing probe. “That’s part of what’s ongoing: what you learn from it, then you’ve got to figure out what it means.” He added: “The important thing is, the jury’s still out on motivation.”

A former senior U.S. counterterrorism official said that “connections to Aulaqi would be problematic on many levels,” calling him “a radicalizer of the first order” with many al-Qaeda ties.

“That said, many people attended that mosque who are not terrorist suspects,” the official said. “The question will be whether the shooter kept in contact with Aulaqi and sought spiritual guidance from him. If that is the case, then this changes the complexion of this case a bit.”

Still, though, this misses the mark on a number of levels.

First off, how would this change the case? And what exactly was Awlaki preaching before he left Falls Church for Yemen? And how big was his audience?

PHOTO: The current imam of the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., not to be confused with the former imam calling Hasan a “hero.”

Coverage of the tragedy at Fort Hood, which left at least 13 dead, has continued its evolution. I mentioned Friday that it began with shock and ended up with Muslims condemning the alleged actions of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The focus now has turned to fallout for the thousands of other Muslim members of the active-duty military.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The push to boost Muslim representation has proven to be a double-edged sword for the military, which desperately needs the Muslim soldiers for their language skills and cultural knowledge, but also worries that a small percentage of those soldiers might harbor extremist ideologies or choose to turn their guns on their fellow soldiers.

In one of the military’s most notorious cases of fratricide since Vietnam, Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, a convert to Islam, rolled a grenade into a tent filled with other soldiers in April 2003. The attack killed two officers and wounded 14 others. During his court-martial, prosecution witnesses testified Sgt. Akbar had committed the attack because he believed the U.S. military would kill Muslim civilians during the coming invasion. Sgt. Akbar was later sentenced to death.

Muslim soldiers also face challenges stemming from their dual identities as adherents of the Islamic faith and as members of the U.S. military. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Muslims serving in the U.S. military often use fake last names to avoid being singled out by insurgents as traitors and to prevent reprisals against their families elsewhere in the world.

Pretty good story from the Wall Street Journal — good graphic and it covers a lot of ground in a short space. But some big unanswered questions. Primarily: Why would insurgents single out these “traitors?”

I can infer, but readers shouldn’t have to. Assumptions lead to mistakes. That’s the first thing I teach the new reporting interns at UCLA’s Daily Bruin.

Let’s see if the Paper of Record did any better. This story from The New York Times surveys what politicians and bureaucrats had to say on the Sunday morning news shows. The short answer: No.

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding dozens of others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.”

“I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” General Casey said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

General Casey, who was appeared on three Sunday news programs, used almost the same language during an interview on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” an indication of the Army’s effort to ward off bias against the more than 3,000 Muslims in its ranks.

“A diverse Army gives us strength,” General Casey, who visited Fort Hood Friday, said on “This Week.”

Senators Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham and Jack Reed also weighed in, thanking Muslim troops for their service. But missing from any of this is discussion of what it means to be a Muslim member of the military. The WSJ discussed the strategic import of Muslim soldiers and the NYT article focused on fears for their treatment. But missing from either article — a quote from one of those Muslims.

Sure, the military is worried, but are they?

Sometimes, it’s hard to believe what your ears are hearing — especially when you are listening to broadcast journalists having to work on deadline under tremendous amounts of pressure. That is why journalists hire experts, people to help them navigate the dense and often tricky language and symbolism of complex organizations, rituals and traditions.

Take Islam, for example.

Near the end of a CNN interview with CNN’s Middle East expert, superstar anchorman Anderson Cooper seeks insights into these haunting images of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, taken hours before he allegedly began shooting his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. It is a Thursday morning and Nasan is wearing clothing that suggests he has just come from prayers or is heading to the mosque.

Thus, Cooper turns to CNN’s Octavia Nasr, although Cooper himself is a veteran reporter in the Middle East. The transcript says:

COOPER: Octavia Nasr, what he is wearing, is that traditional for a Jordan? Or somebody who has spent time in Jordan? I mean it looks — I think it looks pretty — like outfits I’ve seen in Jordan.

NASR: Yes. That’s the traditional Muslim, really. The dress and the head cap. So it’s basically Muslim. It’s not necessarily — so you would see people in Jordan, yes, wearing this. It’s just a comfortable dress, basically underneath the robe that you’re seeing there would be pants, comfortable pants. And the head cap.

So it’s not really a look that you would see around here in the U.S. often. So I personally find it a little bit unusual to see someone in a convenience store with this kind of Muslim garb. Now it could be that, you know, this is from today. So it’s not a day of prayer. Tomorrow is the day of prayer, Friday.

So it is a bit unusual, I find, for him to be wearing this. Except if this is his casual wear and he’s going there in the morning to get his coffee and from the store owner we learned that he went in there very comfortable, sometimes in sweats, sometimes in his workout clothes and sometimes in this garb.

COOPER: Octavia, is it possible that — I mean some people pray every day or even pray five times a day and some people would just go on a Friday. Is it possible that he went every day?

NASR: Of course it is possible, yes, absolutely. That is possible. From my conversation with the store owner, it seemed to me that Friday was an important day of prayer for him. That’s the only day that the store owner mentioned as …

COOPER: I see.

Of course, as mentioned earlier, Friday is THE day of prayer — a day when Muslim men are obligated to pray by their tradition. The tradition calls for them to take a full bath, to use perfume and to attend the mid-day Friday prayer service called the Jumu’ah.

Women are allowed to attend, but this is a service of great importance to men in Islam. The tradition teaches that those who attend will have their sins forgiven — any sins committed since the previous week’s Friday service.

As the tradition teaches:

Narrated by Abu Huraira:

The Prophet said, “When it is a Friday, the angels stand at the gate of the mosque and keep on writing the names of the persons coming to the mosque in succession according to their arrivals.”

Surely the Middle East expert and Cooper knew this. It’s something like wondering why liturgical Christians would make a special attempt to attend the Mass, Holy Eucharist or Divine Liturgy on Sundays. It’s a rather basic fact.

I would assume that the problem is that they could not assume that the viewers knew this?

“… It seemed to me that Friday was an important day of prayer for him.”

Really? Who knew?

Long before Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on Fort Hood, killing at least 13, there was a well-established formula for covering this story.

Start with shock and awe. Then, as information starts to get out, report that the suspected shooter has an Arabic name. Confirm that he was, in fact, a Muslim. Once that has settled in, add to the story about motive the possibility of jihad and the references to 9/11. Finally, within short order, fill out the picture with a story about American Muslims condemning the alleged act of their misguided brother.

Ms. MZ and tmatt were all over the coverage of the Fort Hood massacre last night and this morning. Now here are my thoughts on the Muslim reactions to Hasan’s alleged actions.

Let’s look specifically at coverage from The New York Times: “Muslims at Fort Voice Outrage and Ask Questions.” (The Los Angeles Times also delivered a pretty straightforward story mixing man-on-the-street with advocacy leaders and The Washington Post offered this six-paragraph roll-call of the organizations speaking out.)

In the NYT story, we’ve got great quotes and a narrow window into Muslim life on and around the largest Army base in the country. Oddly, it’s not clear whether the lead quote is from a Muslim or just a friend of Hasan. Often, that wouldn’t matter. But here, on the face of the story, it does. Particularly when you read the remark:

“When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal,” said Victor Benjamin II, 30, a former member of the Army. “But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad.

“Ultimately it was Brother Nidal’s doing, but the command should be held accountable,” Mr. Benjamin said. “G.I.’s are like any equipment in the Army. When it breaks, those who were in charge of keeping it fit should be held responsible for it.”

This story from reporter Michael Moss is fairly short, which almost always serves as a valid defense for not offering more religious depth. But the problem here is more fundamental. This is a classic example of a story about religion that is complete void of any religion.

We get a glimpse of the people at Friday prayers, but learn nothing of the religion that American Muslims are seeking to distinguish from Hasan’s alleged actions:

Among those attending Friday prayers at the Killeen mosque was Sgt. Fahad Kamal, 26, an Army medic who wore his Airborne uniform, and later he said he was angered on several levels. “I want to believe it was the individual, and not the religion, that made him do what he did,” said Sergeant Kamal, who returned to the United States last year after a 15-month tour in Afghanistan. “It’s an awful thing. I feel let down. We’re better than this.”

It was Major Hasan, though, who increasingly felt let down by the military, and deeply conflicted by his religion, said those who knew him through the mosque. Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old substitute teacher whose parents worked at Fort Hood, said Major Hassan was told he would be sent to Afghanistan on Nov. 28, and he did not like it.

“He said he should quit the Army,” Mr. Reasoner said. “In the Koran, you’re not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell.”

That’s really the only religious reference in the story. More importantly, I’d like to know where in the Koran that verse is. The latter might be true — I don’t read Arabic — but I’m pretty sure the former isn’t. Ever heard of the Spanish Golden Age?

I could be wrong here. But it would be nice if the reporter would show me how.

I am always amazed (and I must confess, intimidated) by the quality of journalistic work that true professionals are able to do on deadline.

Of course, the Washington Post had a totally unfair advantage on other national-market newspapers when the story broke at Ford Hood. While Sunbelt newspapers were closer to the action on the ground (and some did not use that location to much advantage), the Post was able to turn its attention to the people who had the best first-hand information on the background of the alleged gunman.

Why? That’s the lede of the stunning early profile that the Post team turned out and had online last night — repeat, last night — while many other news outlets were struggling to make any attempt to cover the painful roles that religion and prejudice appear to have played in this tragedy. Here is how Mary Pat Flaherty, William Wan and Christian Davenport opened the piece:

He prayed every day at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, a devout Muslim who, despite asking to be discharged from the U.S. Army, according to his aunt, was on the eve of his first deployment to war. Yesterday, authorities said Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, a 39-year-old Arlington-born psychiatrist, shot and killed at least 12 people at Fort Hood, Tex.

In an interview, his aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, said he had endured name-calling and harassment about his Muslim faith for years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and had sought for several years to be discharged from the military.

“I know what that is like; I have experienced it myself while working as a bank executive,” she said. “Some people can take it, and some cannot. He had listened to all of that, and he wanted out of the military and they would not let him leave even after he offered to repay” for his medical training.

An Army spokesman, George Wright, said he could not confirm the report of any request to be discharged.

As authorities scrambled to figure out what happened at Fort Hood, a hazy and contradictory picture emerged of a man who received all of his medical training from the military and spent all of his career in the Army, yet turned so violently against his own. Hasan spent much of his professional career at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the District caring for the victims of trauma, yet he spoke openly of his deep opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He steered clear of female colleagues and, despite devout religious practices, listed himself in Army records as having no religious preference, co-workers said.

There are many, many unanswered questions and paradoxes — of course. The Post explored as many as possible on deadline.

The goal was to seek a balance between two sets of facts that had to be kept in tension, namely the allegations of bias against Hasan (can anyone doubt that this was a reality) and the evidence that many of his problems in the military were rooted in his convictions that it was wrong for the American military to be engaged in wars against Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, beliefs that led to conflicts in the ranks of soldiers around him.

Earlier today, the Associated Press moved an update with a vivid image that may or may not link the faith element to the heart of the story:

Soldiers who witnessed the shooting rampage at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead reported that the gunman shouted “Allahu Akbar!” — an Arabic phrase for “God is great!” — before opening fire, the base commander said Friday.

Lt. Gen. Robert Cone said officials had not yet confirmed that the suspected shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, made the comment before the rampage Thursday.

Quite frankly, I have been teaching all morning and have not caught up with the flood of coverage in the past few hours. However, I do have many questions, primarily based on the excellent Post mini-profile and other major reports at dawn.

* Is it true that Hasan had taken special classes to fine-tune his skills with small arms? How does that mesh with his statements to his family about his reluctance, as a psychiatrist, to have any connection with combat or fighting?

* Has anyone seen a description of how Hasan was dressed at the time of the attack? Authorities will pursue any links between the alleged gunman and his victims or words that he spoke to them as the attack began. Was this totally random?

* Of course, investigators will pursue any potential ties between Hasan and terrorists groups. A key question: Had he in fact sought a discharge? Why would someone whose long-range goal was terrorism (the allegations lurking behind those small-arms classes) make strong efforts (described by family members) to leave the military?

* We are going to end up with a timeline of people testifying to two realities that must be kept in balance. One reality is the claims that Army personnel were biased against Hasan because of his Islamic faith. At the same time, we will need to know when he began expressing his controversial beliefs about the U.S. military role in the Middle East.

How much of the conflict around Hasan was based on prejudice and how much was rooted in arguments about how his beliefs were affecting his role in the military? For example, there are clashing reports about negative critiques of his work. What about those emails that he allegedly sent praising suicide bombers? There are many questions to be answered here.

Once again, the Post showed its readers that religious questions would continue to rise to the top of the list. There are paradoxes stacked atop other paradoxes:

Hasan attended the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring and was “very devout,” according to Faizul Khan, a former imam at the center. Khan said Hasan attended prayers at least once a day, seven days a week, often in his Army fatigues.

Khan also said Hasan applied to an annual matrimonial seminar that matches Muslims looking for spouses. “I don’t think he ever had a match, because he had too many conditions,” Khan said. “We never got into details of worldly affairs or politics,” the former imam said of his conversations with Hasan. “Mostly religious questions. But there was nothing extremist in his questions. He never showed any frustration. … He never showed any … wish for vengeance on anybody.”

It is going to take a long time to assemble a final timeline for the events that led up to the massacre at Fort Hood, if, in fact, it is possible to accomplish that task. However, the team at the Post did an amazing job of starting that journey — on deadline.

Yesterday a U.S. Army major opened fire on a military processing center at Fort Hood in Texas, killing 12 people and wounding 30, according to various media reports. Whenever major news breaks, information flies around fast and much of it turns out to be inaccurate.

This case was no different.

Early reports indicated that there were three shooters. Then there were reports that one of the shooters had been killed. Then there were reports that the main suspect — Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan — was the shooter who had been killed. Another report said a police officer had been killed. As I write this, the latest news is that there was only one shooter and he’s not dead but, rather, in stable condition after being shot. And the police officer who shot Hasan is injured but recovering from her injuries.

It is so difficult to get accurate information at times like this. When the media reported each of the things above, they were sourcing the claims to officials who spoke on the record. I believe the same official who reported that the suspect had been killed was the one who later said he was alive. So these reporters and editors weren’t exactly running wild with questionable information. They did their best even if it turned out that a lot of information was incorrect.

Nevertheless, let’s look at some of the other issues in how this news was handled, early on.

I’m actually glad that there wasn’t any immediate speculation (that I saw or read, at least) as to whether the act of terror was done by Muslims. Media outlets were extremely careful to not even bring up the issue of the U.S. military’s current battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. I only wish they wouldn’t speculate at all — the discussion I listened to (I forget which cable outlet) about whether the shooters (yes, plural) were suffering from post traumatic stress disorder was embarrassing and a waste of everybody’s time. I don’t mind a discussion of various possible motivations or a look at military terrorism in the past — which would bring up everything from the Weather Underground to disgruntled soldiers to Muslim attacks — but those discussions need to be careful and balanced.

Moving on, one NBC report I read said that the suspect had an “Arabic-sounding name.” I’m not quite sure what that even means. The line was later removed and then modified. Once the name was released, more details began to trickle out. ABC News’ Brian Ross described the suspect as a “recent convert to Islam.” Turns out he is Muslim but is not a recent convert, having been raised in Islam.

Soon there were other bits and fragments that indicated more of a religious angle. There were reports from a retired colonel who worked with Hasan. He said that Hasan had said Muslims should stand up and and “fight against the aggressor.” He also reported that Hasan was almost happy about the recent deathly shooting by a Muslim at a Little Rock military recruitment center.

Later in the day, this web posting allegedly made by Hasan came to light. In it, he defends the morality of suicide bombing. Here’s how the Associated Press quoted it:

“To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause,” said the Internet posting. “Scholars have paralled (sic) this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers.”

One web site that did a good job of posting information and sourcing it well was The Lede Blog at the New York Times. You can start at the bottom and scroll up to get an idea of how details about the shooting and the shooter emerged. It runs from 4:07 PM when the first post was published and updates continue every few minutes throughout. There isn’t much discussion of religion, though. But an actual Times article about the suspect discusses his religion and how it relates to the shooting quite well.

There are, in fact, many good stories out there right now that neither over- nor under-play Hasan’s religion and the role it may have played in the shooting. But for an example of a major paper that didn’t handle it well, check out the lead story from the Los Angeles Times.

Now, I first came across this story shortly after it was published last night. I monitored it for several hours assuming it would be updated. It had not been updated by the time I had to give up and call it a night (or early morning).

The three reporters and additional contributor who penned the 18-paragraph story didn’t think that it’s relevant that Hasan had praised Muslim suicide bombers or that former colleagues report that he was pleased with Muslim shootings against military institutions or that Hasan’s family says he was distressed by news he faced deployment to the Middle East. None of these things, apparently, are newsworthy to the Times, at least not in comparison with similar reports elsewhere.

The words “Muslim” and “Islam” don’t appear in the early story. Instead we get this:

Base personnel have accounted for more suicides than any other Army post since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, with 75 tallied through July of this year. Nine of those suicides occurred in 2009, counting two in overseas war zones.

Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the Army’s deputy chief of staff, has been leading an effort to reduce the number of Army suicides, which has climbed sharply this year, possibly as a result from long and repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

That is all very interesting but I am not sure what it has to do with the tragic loss of life Ft. Hood experienced yesterday.

The suspect was never deployed — much less in a long or repeated fashion — to Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else. And precisely no one committed suicide yesterday. This story isn’t long — maybe 40 sentences in all. To waste valuable space on something that doesn’t really relate to the incident at hand — particularly while working way too hard to avoid the big elephant in the room — just shows bad news sense.

There’s being cautious and then there’s just being uninformative.

An update now: The latest Los Angeles Times update on this story does include a wide range of information. It’s possible that it was hard — especially in an era of shrinking newsrooms — for a major West Coast newspaper to gather its limited East Coast and Texas resources quickly. Still, other news organizations got the job done.

We’ll be looking at some other coverage of this tragic story as the day continues. Please let us know if you’ve seen particularly good or bad coverage. And, obviously, this is the place to discuss the media coverage — not to vent about the military policies linked to this tragedy or to make hateful, simplistic statements about Islam.

Noor Faleh Almaleki has died in Phoenix. Thus, we have another development in the case of her father, 48-year-old Faleh Hassan Almaleki, who fled the United States after it is alleged that he hit the 20-year-old Noor and the mother of her boyfriend with his car.

The details of this tragic story are quite common by now, everywhere except on CNN. As I said at the beginning, something is going on with the coverage of this story in some newsrooms. People are struggling to report information that is out in the open and on the record.

Here is a chunk of the basic Associated Press report, as used by the New York Times:

Noor Faleh Almaleki, 20, underwent spinal surgery and had been in a hospital since Oct. 20, when police say her father ran down her and her boyfriend’s mother with his Jeep as the women were walking across a parking lot in the west Phoenix suburb of Peoria. The other woman, Amal Khalaf, is expected to survive.

Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, fled after the attack but was arrested Thursday when he arrived at Atlanta’s airport, where he was sent from the United Kingdom after authorities denied him entrance. … At a court hearing over the weekend in Phoenix, county prosecutor Stephanie Low told a judge that Almaleki admitted to committing the crime.

“By his own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family,” Low said. “This was an attempt at an honor killing.”

Family members had told police that Almaleki attacked his daughter because he believed she had become too Westernized and was not living according to his traditional Iraqi values.

Journalists are still struggling to decide how to work their way around the fact that “his traditional Iraqi values” is code language for his approach to Islam, which means journalists are struggling to know how to handle the divisions inside Islam — even here in America — on whether or not it is appropriate to kill a female who brings disgrace on her family. In this case, as noted in other stories, Noor had refused to be part of a marriage arranged by her parents. Over in London, the Times claimed that the marriage had taken place, but that Noor fled to live with her boyfriend’s family in Arizona.

Clearly there is some uncertainty here about some of these events. However, certain facts are clear — especially when you contrast the AP report (and early reports at ABCNews.com) — with the CNN stories that have been scrubbed clean of messy details linked to controversies about Islam and “honor killings” in some Islamic cultures. Again, please note the word “some.”

In the comments pages, this lack of factual information has been blamed on the hard economic times in the news business. It’s hard to report the facts when there are few reporters on deck to do the work. That’s true.

But in this case, editors at CNN have clearly made a decision to leave out facts that are already on the record, as well as highly relevant statements made on the record by authorities investigating the case. This is truly strange.

At this point, this is what we have from CNN. Here’s the key material:

Peoria police said Faleh Hassan Almaleki believed his daughter had become “too Westernized” and had abandoned “traditional” Iraqi values. Peoria police spokesman Mike Tellef told CNN the family moved to the Phoenix area in the mid-1990s, and Almaleki was unhappy with his daughter’s style of dress and her resistance to his rules. …

A friend of the daughter, Amal Edan Khalaf, 43, also suffered serious injuries in the attack, police said. Almaleki faces a separate aggravated assault charge in connection with her injuries.

Once again, is Amal Edan Khalaf merely “a friend”? Why avoid the subject of the arranged marriage, a key element in many of these tragedies? Why avoid the official claims that the father stated that this was an attempted “honor killing,” an attempt that has now turned out to have been successful?

I am sure that, on one level, it is accurate to say that the father “was unhappy with his daughter’s style of dress and her resistance to his rules.” But are we actually talking about “his rules,” or are we talking about the rules and traditions established with the Muslim community that he knows, the community that has shaped him?

Why edit the story in this fashion?

Did you hear about the attempted honor killing a couple of weeks ago in Arizona? I haven’t seen many stories about it. Tmatt looked at the ghosts in some of the coverage a week or so ago but It’s clearly not major news, although national media outlets have begun running their traditional one (or fewer!) stories on the matter. For the life of me, I can’t understand why stories about honor killings or attempted honor killings aren’t major news. This is a concept so very foreign and horrifying to most readers of American media and yet these stories are routinely underplayed. Now maybe the mainstream media doesn’t need advice on how to get more readers/viewers/listeners, but I think that when a father runs down his daughter with two tons of steel over some perceived slight to his honor, that’s newsworthy.

Anyway, here’s the bulk of the CNN report:

An Iraqi man accused of running down his daughter in Arizona because she had become “too Westernized” is being held on two counts of aggravated assault, police said Saturday.

Police in Peoria, Arizona, say Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, struck his 20-year-old daughter, Noor Faleh Almaleki, and her friend Amal Edan Khalaf with the Jeep Laredo he was driving in a parking lot in Peoria on October 20.

After the incident, Almaleki drove to Mexico and abandoned his vehicle in Nogales, Peoria police said.

He then made his way to Mexico City and boarded a plane to London, England. British authorities denied him entry into the country, and he was put on a plane back to the United States, police said.

The daughter’s condition is dire while the friend will likely make it. This CNN report is very brief — 10 sentences in all — so it doesn’t get into much depth. We learn, however, that the father tried to kill her because she was in violation of traditional Iraqi values. We get no word on what informed Mr. Almaleki’s values. There is no mention of his religion, lack thereof or other relevant information. I mean, we may know that 97 percent of Iraqis are Muslim, but that information isn’t shared in the CNN report.

Compare that with this ABC News report that begins with this headline:

Muslim Father Charged With Assault for Running Over ‘Westernized’ Daughter

So the father is not Christian, Yazidi, Mandaean, Jewish or Zoroastrian. Does that have anything to do with the attempted honor killing? Well this story is also very brief, but it raises the religion issue very lightly:

Honor Killings Unfairly Cast Negative Light on Islam

The notion of an honor killing — Muslim men murdering female relatives for dishonoring the family by violating Islamic tenets — made the news over the summer when 17-year-old Rifqa Bary ran away from her parents in Ohio and turned up in the Florida home of Christian pastors Blake and Beverly Lorenz. Rafqa Barry claimed that her Muslim father had threatened to kill her for converting to Christianity.

Rifqa made tearful television appearance, crying on the Lorenzes shoulders, describing how she had to sneak around to attend church.

“They have to kill me because I’m a Christian. It’s an honor [killing]. If they love me more than God, then they have to kill me,” she told ABC’s Orlando affiliate WFTV last month.

Blake Lorenz pointed to other honor killings, including the January 2008 murders of two Texas sisters who were believed to have been murdered by their Muslim father in a religion-fueld rage.

Well, while many honor killings are done by Muslims and most of the remaining take place in countries with strong Muslim culture, honor killings aren’t necessarily Muslim. The practice predates Islam and can be found in other cultures as well. Further, this story seems to slightly confuse the difference between an honor killing and corporal punishment for apostasy.

Honor killings are done against women, usually, and for the crime of dressing the wrong way, alleged sexual indiscretion or refusal to marry a partner chosen by her family. They may or may not be perpetrated by and against Muslims. Killing for apostasy from Islam is just that — punishment for conversion from Islam.

Too bad there’s a media brownout on these stories. There are some super interesting angles to explore. What Islam has to say about honor killings — both officially and in practice — is precisely the type of story that I would like to see.

If you like articles that take readers on journeys to places where faith and culture intersect in new and unexpected ways, then you’ll enjoy reading Kate Shellnutt’s Chicago Sun-Times story, “Young Muslims use punk to loosen their religion.”

The notion of Muslims playing punk rock may seem like incongruous cultures — profanity-laden lyrics following the religion’s traditional greeting (“Salaam aleikum”), melodic Middle Eastern strumming punctuates noisy guitar feedback, purple and red mohawks and Arabic-scripted tattoos. But for the second-generation Americans leading this contemporary cultural movement, Muslim punk isn’t just an irreverent juxtaposition.

Bands like the Kominas call their blending of Muslim values and music performance taqwacore (“a term that fuses the words hard-core and taqwa, Arabic for piety”). The piety is certainly unconventional by orthodox Muslim standards:

With a rebellious attitude and unabashed criticism of both East and West, Muslim punk highlights the breadth of Islamic practice and piety. For this colorful crew, donning patchwork jackets and taking slow drags from hookah pipes, religion is more personal than institutional or dogmatic.

For the most part, the bands drink and smoke, in excess, despite Islam’s prohibition of both. When driving from coast to coast on tour, they’re not stopping to break out prayer mats for the obligatory five-times-a-day salat.

But just because they aren’t practicing Islam in the traditional way doesn’t mean they don’t still consider themselves religious Muslims.

“It’s infinitely more pious to be true to your heart, because that’s where religion really lives,” said (one musician).

This kind of faith language sounds familiar to anyone who has spoken to American youth about religion. But the taqwacore bands also exhibit a uniquely Arab angst:

While this generation’s immigrant parents remain loyal to their home countries, and Muslims in their 30s and 40s having more fully assimilated into American culture, the taqwacore group finds themselves in between.

“The younger kids are more religious, but also more civic-minded,” said Syed Ali, a sociology professor at Long Island University in Brooklyn, who researches second-generation Muslims. “They are very adamant about saying, ‘I am a Muslim,’ but also adamant about saying, ‘I am an American, and I have these rights and no one’s gonna screw with me.’”

Kudos to Shellnutt, a grad student at Chicago’s Medill School of Journalism, who explored both faith and culture with a sure hand. I only wish she had gone further in explaining the broader Taqwacore subculture, complete with its literature, films, and identity issues.

So I finished the 5-part (plus epilogue!) New York Times series about the hostage-taking, captivity and escape of reporter David Rhode. I enjoyed the series, and it reminded me of the one about a similar situation involving the Christian Science Monitor’s Jill Carroll.

This series, written by Rhode, gives a first-person account of his seven months as a Taliban hostage in Pakistan. He was kidnapped with two Afghan colleagues — a translator and a driver — in November 2008 as they traveled to interview a Taliban commander outside Kabul, Afghanistan.

The account is riveting and it will probably not surprise readers of this blog that the story involves more than a bit of religion. In the first installment, Rhodes says that despite seven years of reporting in the region, he didn’t “fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become.” Maybe I don’t understand exactly what he’s getting at but many of my former colleagues at Army Times (some of whom had first-hand knowledge) seemed to understand that years ago, describing the religious movement as just as or even more extreme than Al Qaeda.

One of the most important aspects of the series is how completely it describes multiple temperaments and beliefs among Muslims. At first, Rohde says he was impressed that his guards vowed to follow the tenets of Islam mandating good treatment of prisoners. But his captors begin lying to him and display “an astounding capacity for dishonesty and greed” despite describing themselves as the true followers of Islam. He gets really worried when his Muslim translator is concerned that the captors are “really religious” and praying a lot:

Much of the story discusses the things he did in an attempt to gain favor with this captives. So, for instance, he tells them he wrote articles during the war in Bosnia and that Serbian Orthodox Christians had arrested him there after he’d exposed the massacre of Muslims.

It also looks at what has to be a remarkably under-reported story about misconceptions about Christians among certain Muslims:

I tried to get to know one of the guards, who was preparing to be a suicide bomber. A young man in his 20s with a slim build and brown eyes, he said he had studied engineering in high school. He never attended college but was relatively well educated compared with the other fighters.

When I asked him why he wanted to die, he replied that living in this world was a burden for any true Muslim. Heaven was his goal, he said. Earthly relationships with his parents and siblings did not matter.

He spoke a smattering of English, and my own beliefs seemed to interest and amaze him. During our six weeks together, he asked me a series of questions. Was it true, he asked, that a necktie was a secret symbol of Christianity? Was it true that Christians wanted to live 1,000 years?

His captors rail against the evils of a secular society. They celebrate a suicide attack on a mosque in Jamrud, Pakistan, that killed 50 because Pakistan has an apostate government, they said.

Again, here’s the discussion of more than one kind of Islam:

One commander declared that no true Muslim could live in a state where Islam was not the official religion. He flatly rejected my compromise suggestion that strict Islamic law be enacted in Afghanistan’s conservative rural south, while milder forms of Islam be followed in the comparatively liberal north.

Citing the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam, he said it was every Muslim’s duty to try to stop others from sinning. If one person in a village commits a sin, those who witness it and do not stop him will also be punished by God.

After we had been held for months in captivity, my kidnappers demanded that I stop washing the group’s dishes because they did not want to catch my diseases. They believed that problems I was having with my stomach stemmed from my being an inherently unclean non-Muslim, not from unhygienic water.

Their rigidity was the opposite of the tolerant attitudes I had found among the vast majority of Muslims I had met in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pressing me to convert, one commander ordered me to read a passage of the Koran each day and discuss it with him at night. He dismissed my arguments that a forced conversion was not legitimate. He and the guards politely said they felt sorry for me. If I failed to convert, they said, I would suffer excruciating pain in the fires of hell.

At one point, a visiting fighter demanded to know why I would not obey. He said that if it were up to him, he would take me outside and offer me a final chance to convert. If I refused, he would shoot me.

Rohde describes himself as a nonobservant Christian, although he also discusses prayer throughout the series, including his recitation of the Lord’s Prayer during times of distress. There’s even a poignant bit where he says a Taliban commander who had been pressing him to convert told him that if he said “forgive me, God” 1,000 times each day, his captivity might end. Rohde did it but got no results.

Still, the prayers soothed him and passed the time so he did it ever day. The night on which he escapes, waiting to make sure the guards were sound asleep, he asks God to forgive him 2,000 times. Later that night, he and his translator made it out of the house and onto safe ground.