The definitive website with the definitive answer.

I wish I had thought of this.

I didn’t, but I’m more than happy to do anything I can to get the percentage of Americans who still believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim into single digits.

A local bookstore has few books for sale.

There’s quite a selection here.  If you’re interested in any of the titles, I’ll let you know where to find them…

This week our sale cart is featuring titles concerning Islam and/or events in the Mideast. All titles listed below will recieve a 50% discount at the cash register:

• The Rise of Babylon $12.99
• Iran: The Coming Crisis $13.99
• Muhammad’s Monsters: Comprehensive Guide to Radical Islam $13.99
• Journey Into the Mind of an Islamic Terrorist $14.99
• (Is the Battle Against Terrorism a Prelude to…) The Last War $10.99
• The Unseen Face of Islam: Sharing the Gospel with Ordinary Muslims $13.99
• The Prophet & the Messiah: An Arab Christian’s Perspective on Islam and Christianity $14.00
• Whose Holy City?: Jerusalem and the Future of Peace in the Middle East $15.99
• The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism $18.00

Never mind… Fox News just called and they want their books back.

Last night, the Harding University Honors College hosted another session in L.C. Sears Seminar Series at the American Heritage Auditorium.

This year’s event was entitled: “Islam in America: A Dialogue in Faith” and features a discussion between Dr. Monte Cox, Associate Dean of the Harding’s College of Bible and Religion and Dr. Nabil Bayakly of Memphis, Tennessee.

This was a great event and it was well-organized and attended. The auditorium was full and that would put the crowd at about 400. It looked like most of the audience was from the Harding community.

Dr. Bayakly spoke for about thirty-five minutes about the history of Islam in America and Dr. Cox offered some quick observations of his own. The rest of the evening was taken up with dialog between them and questions from the audience.

All of the questions were directed toward Dr. Bayakly and were friendly in nature. Dr. Bayakly is a very disarming person who knows the Harding community. I’d like to think that he was able to put a face on Islam for many audience members who had never had an opportunity to hear a Muslim discuss his faith in person.

I felt that the strongest point made by Dr. Bayakly was his observation that Americans “don’t know anything about politics”. At the time, Dr. Bayakly was making a point about how little attention we give to looking at the Palestinian conflict from the perspective of Palestinians.

I would have to agree — although not necessarily about Americans not knowing anything about politics.

I think one of the changes that is coming to America and the Middle East in the next year or so is a foreign policy based less on a knee-jerk acceptance to Israel’s policies on the occupied territories and Palestinian political rights.

It would be hard to summarize everything that was said last night other than to make the most self-evident observation: a Muslim and a Christian held a rational and thoughtful discussion on the differences in our two faiths and nobody walked away angry.

I’m anxious to hear what the rest of you who were present last night thought.

And nice work by the Hardings Honors College in putting together another great campus event. Keep up the good work!

h/t: jm for the photo

On Sunday evening, the Harding Honors College will hold another session in the L.C. Sears Seminar Series at 7:00 pm in the American Heritage Auditorium.

This year’s event is entitled: “Islam in America: A Dialogue in Faith” and features a discussion between Dr. Monte Cox, Associate Dean of the Harding’s College of Bible and Religion and Dr. Nabil Bayakly of Memphis, Tennessee.

This Dr. Bayakly’s second visit to the Harding campus.

In March 2006, Dr. Bayakly and Rabbi Elliot Gertel of Congregation Rodfei Zedek in Chicago participated in an L.C. Sears seminar on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

It should be an educational and entertaining evening. I’ll post a story on Monday morning.

This promotional video for the event was shown in chapel today.

There are times when I can’t believe I walk the same earth, breathe the same air and worship the same God as some people.

This is one of them.

It’s sad to think that there is as least one man or woman who lives in the Virginia 5th congressional district who was deemed by voters to be less fit to serve in congress than Rep. Goode.

And I’m really getting tired of asking non-Christians to forgive us when we act like idiots.

So I won’t.

I’ve been quite critical of President Bush for not knowing that there is a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims before the invasion of Iraq.

I still think that kind of information is fairly low-brow stuff, particularly for a commander-in-chief. It’s certainly something that should be picked up in a standard international relations course. Like mine for example.

To be entirely fair, it’s also something that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee should know as well.

In a recent interview with Congressional Quarterly magazine, Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who will assume the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee in January, said that al-Qaeda was a predominantly Shiia organization.

Actually, the opposite is true. The terrorist group al-Qaeda exercises a form of Sunni extremism.

During that same interview, Reyes tanked on questions about Hezbollah as well and was unable to identify that group as Sunni or Shiite (it’s Shiite).

Worse yet, CQ asked the same questions of committee members Jo Ann Davis (R-Va.), and Terry Everett (R-Ala.) last summer and they dropped the ball. Reyes should have suspected that he would eventually get the same questions at some point, whether or not he was the chairman of the committee.

To his credit, Reyes was able to identify al-Qaeda as an enemy of the United States.

I’ve seen this same kind of thing from some of my students at the end of a semester. I can only conclude that Mr. Reyes has been sleeping through his intelligence briefings.

But if he asks for extra credit, it’s a re-vote.

One of my favorite teachers in college used to say that the biggest problem with most of us is that we insist that the world is painted in black and white when it is really painted in technicolor.

Sometimes, there are cases where it seems as if everybody is wrong and everybody is right at the same time.

Back in September, a Danish newspaper pushed the limits of journalistic freedom about as far they can go. In an effort to editorialize about the freedom of expression and self-censorship, the Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. The cartoons were subsequently re-published in several European newspapers. While there was little reaction in the Muslim world in September, there has been plenty of reaction recently.

Several of these renderings are unflattering representations of the Prophet but that is beside the point. To most Muslims, any rendering of an image of Mohammed is considered blasphemous and offensive. Exercising my own self-censorship, I’m not going to provide a link to the images in question. But if you want to see what they look like, I would suggest trying Wikipedia.

Over the last several days, Muslims have been rioting in Middle Eastern cities and several governments in the region have demanded that the newspapers and their governments apologize. But for some Muslims, even an apology may not be enough. The leader of the Palestinian group Hamas has called the cartoons “an unforgivable insult” that merits punishment by death. The Danish embassies in Beirut and Damascus have been attacked by mobs and set on fire and several nations have severed economic ties with Danish companies.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s public statement on the Muslim demonstrations is representative of the balancing act that the governments of the West have been forced into: “Freedom of the press is one of the great assets as a component of democracy, but we also have the value and asset of freedom of religion.” For its part, the Bush administration has likewise criticized the publication of the cartoons but has also been careful to not condemn press freedom.

This is not the first time that Muslims have responded viscerally to alleged blasphemy in the Western press. My first immediate thought when I heard about the caricatures case was the death warrant issued against Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini for Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses in 1989.

But there is no excuse for a host government allowing an embassy or consulate to be stormed by a mob. It is a violation of written and customary international law and the governments of Syria and Lebanon should be held accountable. To its credit, the Lebanese government has issued an apology to Denmark for the violence and the destruction of its mission in Beirut.

But the demand from Muslim leaders to have the European newspapers in question censured by their governments illustrates a lack of understanding about press freedom in Western societies. While it is true that in many parts of the world (like Syria) the press can only publish what the government allows, this is not the case in the West. It also serves re-enforce the view held by many Westerners that political pluralism can’t possibly work in the Middle East. A truly democratic society is based on an understanding that all ideas are open to criticism. Even in the West, it has been difficult at times to accept this principle as it applies to religious dogma.

On the other hand, I have to say that I admire the Islamic world’s veneration of what it considers to be holy. I just can’t accept the idea that when those symbols are not treated with the respect they believe they deserve that the appropriate response is a riot.

Self-censorship may be bad at times but it is certainly preferable to living in a society where the government or a group of self-appointed Talibanists are in charge of deciding what is worth publishing in a newspaper and what is not.