In the tense landscape of the Middle East, there is little room left for Jewish Arabs, a tiny minority in this country as well as in places like Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. But in Bahrain, the king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, has taken unprecedented steps for an Arab leader to show his support for his dwindling Jewish population. Last year, he appointed a Jewish woman, Houda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, as ambassador to the United States, the first Jewish ambassador posted abroad by any Arab country.

The Shiites, though, apparently aren’t so sure about how tolerant the atmosphere really is.

There is also some resentment at the king’s support for the small Jewish community. Bahrain is hot with sectarian tensions: the king, a Sunni Muslim, is accused of discriminating against Shiite Muslims, who make up a majority of the native population. Shiites are barred from almost all positions in the military and security services, and they say they are not given the same employment and education opportunities as their Sunni neighbors.

Shiites complain that the 36 Jews are treated better than they are, and that the king’s Jewish outreach is intended to make Bahrain appear to be a tolerant society, papering over the systemic discrimination they say they experience.

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Nearly a year later, Mr. Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency in a sustained and widening effort that has left even skeptics surprised.

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You can see a clip from part one here.

Should Comedy Central have “caved” and censored the show? I don’t think so. Here’s Comedy Central’s thinking on it:

The network may have felt it had no choice after revolutionmuslim.com, the website of a fringe group, delivered a grim warning about the previous week’s episode, which seemed to depict Muhammad dressed as a bear. “We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably windup like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show,” the posting said. A photo of Van Gogh’s body lying in the street was included with the posting. “This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”

Here’s a very brief account of what happened to Van Gogh (yes, he was related to that Van Gogh) in 2004.

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Where are the King’s? The Gandhi’s? The St. Francis’? St. Francis? Yes. I haven’t read the book yet, but it’s on my list, Paul Moses’ book, The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace. In his article on CNN, Paul Moses discusses how St. Francis “engaged Christendom’s enemy, Egypt’s Sultan Malik al-Kamil, by approaching him unarmed in the midst of the Fifth Crusade in 1219.” The encounter was interesting, to say the least, and a powerful witness to the tradition of compassion and respect in both religions.

[Francis'] goal was to convert Sultan al-Kamil to Christianity through peaceful persuasion. He didn’t succeed in that, but, amazingly, the two men found common ground and appear to have genuinely appreciated each other.

The sultan, who no doubt viewed Francis in light of an ancient Muslim tradition of reverence for holy Christian monks, permitted him to stay in his camp for several days, preaching the enemy’s faith in the midst of the Crusade.

The short article is well worth reading. I especially was intrigued by an new organization, Charter for Compassion. Moses explains the group’s purpose. He even bring Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize into the discussion and the criticism Obama has faced from some US evangelicals on his peaceful overtures to Muslim nations.

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There were protests in Malaysia yesterday and four arson attacks on Christian churches, apparently provoked by a court decision to allow Christians to use the word Allah.

[Photo from afp]

Police at Kuala Lumpur church torched in arson attack

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The minaret of the new Grand Mosque of Marseille, whose cornerstone will be laid here in April, will be silent — no muezzin, live or recorded, will disturb the neighborhood with the call to prayer. Instead, the minaret will flash a beam of light for a couple of minutes, five times a day.

Normally, the light would be green, for the color of Islam. But Marseille is a port, and green is reserved for signals to ships at sea. Red? No, the firefighters have reserved red.

Instead, said Noureddine Cheikh, the head of the Marseille Mosque Association, the light will almost surely be purple — a rather nightclubby look for such an elegant building.

…Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France and member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, says that the debates over minarets, burqas and national identity have angered many French-born Muslims and brought them together in a defensive circle.

This is a tough call. On the one hand, I’m all for religious tolerance. But on the other hand it seems that historical tradition should be respected, too. But then that also cuts both ways. Take Spain and its transformation from Islamic to Catholic rule. If we just go by “who was there first”, this would often thwart the natural flow of history, whether that “flow” came at the end of a sword or not. If Maryland had been settled by Muslims but over the past 50 years a vibrant Christian minority had flourished, should church towers and bells be banned in deference to the over 200 year history of a predominantly Muslim populace? Or if Maryland had been predominantly Catholic (which it was) but now Orthodox Jews were in the ascendancy, should synagogues and payos be banned?

The sad truth is that tensions between different cultures (even those that share the same religion) is practically inevitable especially when there’s a lack of sensitivity and understanding on both sides.

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Along the lines of the Cohen article I cited, this blog post by Jeffrey Goldberg addresses another aspect of the acceptable range of civil discourse about religion and violence.

I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I’ve argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

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But there is another creationist movement whose influence is growing, and which is fueling challenges to science in countries where Christianity has little sway: Islamic creationism. Campaigners in countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and Indonesia have fought the teaching of evolution in schools there, sometimes with great success. Creationist conferences have been held in Pakistan, and moderate Islamic clerics are on record publicly condemning Darwin’s ideas. A recent study of Muslim university students in the Netherlands showed that most rejected evolution. And driven in part by a mysterious Turkish publishing organization, Islamic creationism books are hot sellers at bookstores throughout the Muslim world.

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Sheik Adil is black, and the son of a poor immigrant from the Persian Gulf. Leading prayers at the Grand Mosque is an extraordinary honor, usually reserved for pure-blooded Arabs from the Saudi heartland. So he was taken aback when the phone rang last September and a voice told him that King Abdullah had chosen him as the first black man to lead prayers in Mecca. Days later Sheik Adil’s unmistakably African features and his deep baritone voice, echoing musically through the Grand Mosque, were broadcast by satellite TV to hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world.

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When Baghdad opened its gates as the new capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the prime site in the city was occupied by the royal library. Both the city and the library, completed around 765, were built by Caliph al-Mansur, who devised a method for measuring the circumference of the Earth and was second in a long line of Abbasid caliphs who valued thought and learning above all else. The Abbasids created, shaped and developed one of the most rich and fertile periods of science in human history.

The library was officially called “the House of Wisdom”. It was a monumental structure, accommodating translators, copyists, scholars, scientists, librarians and the swelling volumes of Persian, Sanskrit and Greek texts that flooded into Baghdad. Not surprisingly, it became a magnet for seekers of knowledge from across the Muslim empire.

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