Life Meets Faith: Koran burnings, mosques, news media and sources

Church pastor Terry Jones of Florida is not being offered any awards for his peacemaking abilities. Rather he is being hailed as an instrument of Islamophobia. Many Americans say they are ashamed of what he has done. That is, they are ashamed that one of theirs scheduled a Koran burning.

Apparently what helped trigger Jones' plans to burn the Muslim holy book was the announcement that a Muslim Imam in New York is planning to have a mosque built two blocks away from Ground Zero. Likely every reader knows that a mosque is a place of Islamic (Muslim) worship. The offense people refer to in this case arises because the terror attacks of 9/11 were committed by extremely devout Muslim men. They believed that their god, Allah, wanted them to strike at America.

With the many extreme opinions being expressed about Jones on the one hand and the mosque construction plans on the other, I decided that it might be good if I could find Jones and the Imam in question speaking for themselves. With the help of Google and YouTube of course, this is not difficult.

Along the way I caught Larry King interviewing Donald Trump. Trump described the scene of thousands of New Yorkers marching to protest the planned construction of the mosque. Interestingly Trump had attempted what some might call a quintessential American solution to the problem. He offered money. He tried to pay more than (what he thinks) the property is worth to the seller of the building.

When I actually heard and saw the Imam and Jones, I was surprised. I had thought that both might be offering extreme statements meant to manipulate hearers at an emotional level. What I found was something much different.

First, it turns out that the Imam says he is not planning to build a mosque, but a cultural centre. Now this may be semantics because Islamic worship could likely take place in an Islamic cultural centre. Also from my understanding of Islam, it is very difficult to extract the religion of Islam from the culture(s) of Islam.

Nevertheless, there is a distinction to be made between a mosque and a cultural centre. The first would be more about keeping and spreading Islamic religion as authoritative truth. A mosque is more about submission than discussion (Islam means "to submit"). The second suggests opportunities for dialogue between Muslims and non- Muslims.

This could be an important difference. If in fact the Imam and his colleagues are interested in dialogue, then at the very least there is opportunity to persuade them to change their minds about where they want to build. Here Trump's words rang true for me. He claimed that if the Imam were to build in a different location, it would be a tremendous gesture of good will to the American people. If they do not, much ill feeling will be the result.

Terry Jones also did not live up to his (recently minted) reputation as a die-hard crackpot preacher out to sabotage relations between the West and the Islamic world. In the posted interview he renounced his plans to burn the Koran, doing so not ungraciously and with a little self-deprecating humour to boot.

It seems he and his church wanted to make the point the Koran itself is not without influence in encouraging extremist action. He claimed that the death threats he received established that point very well. And that was enough for him.

And this brings me to the last thing I want to say about controversies concerning Islam or the Koran. Whether or not anyone should agree with Jones that the Koran corrupts is best resolved not by pulling media statements out of the air. It is best resolved by something much simpler. Just read the book. In case you are like me and don't read Arabic, there are printed translations of the Koran in libraries and bookstores.

The moral I have learned this past week is that if you are truly interested in a story, it is best to get as close to the sources of controversies as you can. You may find that the people and the things they are alleged to say have been interpreted to make the lines of controversy sharper than they otherwise would be (this sells more newspapers and generates more hits).

And when there is a dispute about the value of a disputed religious text, maybe the best you can do is to simply put aside what others have been saying and find a copy of it online or in the local library. You may be able to make a start yourself at determining the value of what you are reading.

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