Islam-Muslims

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Bait and switch? Contradictory Iran election coverage still has an uncertain ending

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Bait and switch? Contradictory Iran election coverage still has an uncertain ending

Which faction came out on top in the recent Iranian elections? Was it the "reformists"?  The "moderates"? Or was it the hardline clerics who run the Islamic republic and get to decide who is allowed to stand for election?

I ask because it remains difficult, some two weeks after the late February balloting, to tell from a face-value reading of the various media reports just who emerged victorious in the voting for both the nation's unicameral parliament and its clerical consultative body. The latter officially (if not necessarily in reality) has a hand in selecting Iran's all-important supreme leader.

This election muddle underscores how essential it is for journalists to weigh voting results firmly in the context of the nation involved. Confusion is bound to follow when imprecise political labels -- such as reformists or moderates -- are borrowed from Western discourse to simplify complicated foreign political intrigues for American media followers.

The muddle also serves to underscore the dangers inherent in jumping to sweeping conclusions based on initial returns.

Moreover, I can't help but wonder whether there's an element of wishful thinking is also at play here. After all, I think most Americans, and the media they follow as well, would love to see Iran become more open to the West and tone down its anti-Western rhetoric and actions now that its nuclear agreement has been signed.

Some examples of what I mean:

Example A is this early election results story from the BBC, which includes this far too premature declaration: "This stunning election result will make a difference in Iran's engagement with the wider world."


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Study Quran in English? The Daily Beast details this surprising new book

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Study Bibles were all the rage when they first became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Evangelical Protestants popularized this trend, but it wasn’t long before there was an Orthodox Study Bible, a Catholic Study Bible and a Jewish Study Bible.

But a study Quran?

How do you study a work said to have been dictated by the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed between AD 610 and AD 632 and passed along to his followers who, it’s assumed, memorized his words perfectly? Judaism and Christianity have survived critical scholarship about their holy books, but Islam has resisted such questions.

And so I was intrigued by a recent Daily Beast piece about why a new Study Quran is riling the Islamic world. It starts thus:

A new translation of the Quran, with commentary, is causing a stir—and maybe something of a revolution -- in the world of English-speaking Muslims.


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Franklin Graham: Another Trump? Yes and no, RNS profile says

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The Religion News Service takes a skeptical but fair-minded look at Franklin Graham -- his beliefs, his politics, his differences from his famed father, Billy Graham -- in a satisfyingly long profile rolled out for Super Tuesday week.

And no, that’s not a chance coincidence, as Godbeat veteran Cathy Lynn Grossman crafts the story:

While Donald Trump campaigns to "Make America great again," Franklin Graham, facing a nation where conservative believers are losing cultural clout, wants to make it Christian again. Week after week, he stands on winter-wind-swept statehouse steps and exhorts crowds like a biblical Nehemiah, warning people to repent to rebuild Jerusalem — with a gospel twist. He urges them to pray first and then vote for Bible-believing evangelical candidates.
But you can’t vote for him.
"No, no!" he is "absolutely not" running for office, said Graham, who tends to rat-a-tat-tat his points.
Instead, he exhorts his listeners to run themselves, starting with local city and county offices. Imagine, he says at every tour stop, the impact on society if "the majority of the school boards were controlled by evangelical Christians."

This sweeping, 2,200-word article is impressive, though not without a couple of issues. It tells of Franklin's rise in building the Samaritan's Purse charity, from a small medical mission into one of the largest disaster relief and development agencies in the U.S. And it adroitly parallels the presidential primary campaigns with Franklin's $10 million "Decision America" barnstorming tour, which often "takes him into town just ahead of a primary or caucus."


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Update on status of Samuel P. Huntington's predicted 'Clash of Civilizations'

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Update on status of Samuel P. Huntington's predicted 'Clash of Civilizations'

The global news continues to grow grimmer. The great unraveling seems to be accelerating even faster than it can be Tweeted.

The primary focal points are the Middle East, North Africa and Europe -- the last largely as a result of the mass dislocations caused by war and poverty in the first two. Some sub-Saharan African nations -- Nigeria and hopelessly dysfunctional Somalia, to name just two -- certainly may be included.

Thanks to our globalized media, all this misery, fear, murderous depravity and loathing flows into our homes and awareness in real time. And we call this progress, a communications revolution.

An explanation for this meditation seems necessary.

Perhaps a good place to begin is by reflecting again on what has been labeled the "Clash of Civilizations." The term is most often attributed to Samuel P. Huntington, the late Harvard international affairs professor and Carter administration national security adviser, even though it was actually used years earlier by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus and others.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the clash spoken of is the cognitive and emotional gulf that sets one portion of humanity apart from another, leading to hostility rooted in conflicting values generally expressed in religious, political and economic terms. Civilization refers to the sum total of a group's world view, its professed religious values acting as a cultural cornerstone.


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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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Al Jazeera America's demise and American concerns about Islam and Arabs

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Al Jazeera America's demise and American concerns about Islam and Arabs

Soliciting and editing opinion pieces was part of my job many times during my almost 50 years around the news and communications business. Being a highly opinionated sort myself, I enjoyed that work quite a lot.

However, I've often been unsure about just how much to pressure an op-ed writer to add to, better justify or delete something they wrote.

In the end, I generally left the final decision to the writer. An op-ed is, after all, the writer's opinion about a subject and what they think is most important about it. It's the writer's prerogative to cherry pick from among the "facts" available on whatever the issue. The editor's job is to edit for style, grammar, originality, organization, libel and slander, personal animus and logical cohesiveness.

It's true that this can -- and often does -- result in one-sided, unfair and even intellectually dishonest copy. But that's the nature of the beast. Don't like it? Well, if you're in a position of authority you can always decide not to publish a piece or solicit another writer to produce one more to your liking. Or you can write one yourself (and hopefully find someone willing to publish it, but that's another issue).

A recent New York Times op-ed about the soon-to-close Al Jazeera America is a case in point.  (I'll get more precise shortly.)

One of the main reasons GetReligion was founded was to note this sort of imbalance when it shows up in basic, hard-news copy, specifically as it relates to religion news.


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Sunni vs. Shi'a Muslims worldwide: What? Why? Where? How many?

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Sunni vs. Shi'a Muslims worldwide: What? Why? Where? How many?

JIM ASKS:

Muslims in the U.S.: Sunni or Shi’a? And a second reader asks about the two groups’ numbers and over-all relationship on the international level.

THE RELIGION GUY ANSWERS:

This two-sided split underlies the increasingly dangerous Mideast rivalry between a rising Shi’a axis under revolutionary Iran and a bloc led by Saudi Arabia with its strict Sunni regime. A 2012 Pew Research survey asked people in Sunni lands “do you personally consider Shi’as to be Muslims or not?” Those  answering “no” ranged from 37 to 52 percent in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and Tunisia. This troublesome rejection of Shi’a religious legitimacy is enforced with a vengeance by the bloodthirsty “Islamic State” that purports to have restored the Sunni “caliphate” within Iraq and Syria.

On Jim’s question, there’s considerable dispute about the total of U.S. Muslims but Pew estimates 10 to 15 percent are Shi’a,  roughly the same as in Canada and Britain. Iran contains some 40 percent of the world’s Shi’as, followed by sizable populations in southern Iraq, India, and Pakistan, and smaller numbers across Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

Globally, the Muslim population estimated at 1.5 billion is heavily Sunni, with a Shi’a minority of perhaps 13 percent. Some say followers of Sufi mysticism form a third branch of Islam, which is more or less true, but they overlap the other two categories and are hard to count. (This over-simplified discussion will omit many Muslim variants and those regarded as heterodox.)

The Sunni vs. Shi’a schism was as much political as religious.


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Turn, turn, turn: It's time to take religious stock of the Obama Era

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Turn, turn, turn: It's time to take religious stock of the Obama Era

As journalists look back to take stock of President Obama’s legacy, religious aspects deserve some attention. The Washington Post’s “Acts of Faith” blog posted an example January 12 from  Peter Manseau, co-founder of the pleasantly skeptical KillingTheBuddha.com, who scanned America’s history of pluralism in last year’s “One Nation Under Gods.”

Pursuing his book’s theme, Manseau proposed that this president “has embraced a more inclusive approach to religion than any of his predecessors.” But in making himself “the nation’s pluralist-in-chief” Obama “seems to have had an opposite effect in much of the country.” As his presidency wanes, he “leads a nation more divided along religious lines than at any other time in recent history.”

All of Manseau’s assertions are open to debate and worth pursuing by journalists.

Biographical recap: The president’s father Barack Senior, who abandoned Barack Junior, was born Muslim in Kenya but was an atheist as an adult. (Nonetheless, under a strict interpretation of Islamic law the son is automatically a Muslim, and in certain jurisdictions would be subject to execution as an apostate for forsaking his birth religion.)

Obama Junior was raised by a freethinking mother who taught her son about various religious paths. During their years in Indonesia he attended both Muslim and Catholic schools. Later, Obama was raised by grandparents who had been sometime Unitarians.

As an adult, the president-to-be converted to the liberal wing of “mainline” Protestantism. He was baptized at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, led by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, attended regularly, was married at Trinity and had his daughters baptized there.


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The New York Times digs into 'Arab' sex problems (and all Arabs are alike, you know)

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At the time of 9/11, my family was part of an Eastern Orthodox parish in South Florida in which most of the members -- a strong majority -- were either Arab or Lebanese. It was an eye-opening experience to say the least.

One strong memory: The anger of grandparents noting that their grandchildren were being harassed at local schools -- in one case, pushed around on a playground -- because they were "Arabs" and "Arabs" attacked the World Trade Center. This American-born child from a Christian Arab home was wearing his gold baptismal cross at the time the other kids jumped him.

Don't people realize, parishioners kept saying, that "Arab" is not a religious term, that "Arab" is not the same thing as "Muslim"? Don't they know that Christians have been part of Middle Eastern culture since the early church? Don't they know that the "Muslim world" is not the same thing as the "Arab world"?

I thought of this while reading a New York Times Sunday Review article that ran with this headline: "The Sexual Misery of the Arab World." Here is how it starts:

ORAN, Algeria -- After Tahrir came Cologne. After the square came sex. The Arab revolutions of 2011 aroused enthusiasm at first, but passions have since waned. Those movements have come to look imperfect, even ugly: For one thing, they have failed to touch ideas, culture, religion or social norms, especially the norms relating to sex. Revolution doesn’t mean modernity.

Note the reference to "ideas, culture, religion or social norms." Let's continue:


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