Islam
Fiction
FACTS about Islam Include:
The crescent and star is the symbol for the Islamic faith.
An open hand is a metaphor for the five pillars of Islam: faith — followers believe in one god; prayer — Muslims pray five times a day; pilgrimage — Muslims should try to visit Mecca; fasting — followers don't eat, drink or have sex during the day for one month; giving alms — believers help the poor.
The mosque is the traditional place of worship and prayer.
The majority of Muslims live peace-living lives. (Below) Risad Baghdadi, Damascus, Syria, graduate student and president of Muslim student association, kneels for prayer at the KU Muslim Center, 1300 Ohio St.
Last Friday was the first anniversary of a traumatic event for many Americans—the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
It also spurs remembrance of a low in Western media coverage that could only be interpreted as hasty reporting that led to prejudice.
Right after the bombing, images of Muslim extremists were broadcast on televisions around the country as the first suspects.
On the day of the blast, the KU Muslim Center, 1300 Ohio St., received an obscene phone call from a woman who blamed Islam for the death of innocent people.
Students at the center were appalled.
"This is a place of prayers. You don't call a place of prayers and start cusing," said Hadi Alhassani, graduate student from Yemen and member of the Muslim student association at the University of Kansas. "A week later she called here and left a message on our answering machine in tears."
Alhassani said the coverage of Islam by Western media was a constant flasco that Muslims were forced to deal with.
The caller had realized her mistake and had called to apologize.
"It doesn't get enough coverage, and the coverage it gets is negative," he said. "We've lived with it for years, and we've grown to accept it."
Alhassani said that Muslim terrorists who usually were depicted in the news weren't representative of the Islamic population as a whole.
Simply visiting the Muslim Center near campus is evidence of this. A very peaceful setting, where when one enters the building, shoes must be taken off. The center could be considered an average home in Lawrence, except that two living room areas have been cleared out and devoted to prayer, and the rhythmic chanting of the Koran can be heard floating through the house during prayer times.
No AK-47 assault rifles are leaning against the walls, and any sense of violence seems thousands of miles away.
"They're not called people by their names, they're called Muslim extremists," Alhassani said of the terrorists. "Just because someone calls himself a Muslim doesn't mean he represents us."
"The Islamic religion receives a lot of negative press when it's associated with Hamas or a terrorist group," she said. "You can't hate all Muslims because of Hamas. That's not fair."
Instead, Alhassani said the positive aspects of Muslim Americans never made the news. He said that followers of Islam were educated, hard-working citizens who had low rates of divorce, unemployment and drug abuse.
One example of how Islam is misunderstood is the use of the word "jihad" by the Western media. Jihad usually is defined as "holy war" and often is used to describe violent opposition by Islamic extremists to all facets of Western life.
Karyn Ullman, Houston senior and member of the Hillel Foundation, a Jewish student organization, said that she had many Islamic friends.
But religious experts say that interpretation is wrong.
"Muhammad said that the struggle within one's self is more important," said Daniel Breslauer, professor of religious studies and an authority on Islam.
Breslauer said that Muhammad, the prophet of Allah, the god of Islam, preached jihad as an inner struggle to make one's self more pious. Even so, the term can be used to refer to the struggle against oppressive outside forces that won't allow one to be holy.
"You're trying to overpower your animal instincts," Alhassani said of his definition of Islam. "You don't just bomb some place or hijack innocent people and say that it's hijad."
So why is there so much violence in the Middle East, and why are extremists committed to violence in the name of jihad?
Breslauer said that friction between the West and Middle East countries could be traced all the way back to the Crusades. He said that the Islamic religion was a supporter of Christianity during this time period.
"Islam was a sophisticated, advanced religion from which Medieval Christianity learned a lot," Breslauer said.
Breslauer said that because Judaism, Christianity and Islam were so alike, they often were ideologically opposed.
"Groups that resemble yours are a greater threat to draw members from than groups that differ significantly from yours," he said.
But Breslauer also said that economic oppression by the West, like oil exploitation, contributed greatly to global friction in the Middle East.
Alhassani said that the Western need for oil from the Middle East, along with the support of governments that discriminate against Muslims, have caused most of the friction.
"If the government would stop to think what it's doing right now — it's building animosity in the people," he said. "Sooner or later it will explode."
And it doesn't look like things are changing, according to a Jan. 21 article in The New York Times entitled, The Red Menace is Gone. But Here's Islam.
The article said Congress approved $20 million to regulate covert activity in Iran, a country often linked to Islamic extremism by the media, threat or no threat. According to the article, "the policy is likely only to fuel paranoia in Tehran that the United States is determined to destroy Iran's Islamic republic."
But Alhassani would like to see relations improved. He said he encouraged students who were interested in the religion to come to the center to learn about the subject.
More knowledge of the religion itself would help people filter out falsities of the media's coverage of Islam, Alhassani said.
"To build up that filter, you really have to know about what this whole word Islam means," he said.
MYTHS about Islam Include:
All Muslims hate Americans and encourage terrorism like the Aatylatoll Khomeini did. (top)
Islamic extremists were responsible for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Assad Siddiqi, the New York City cab driver (pictured above), was one of the first suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing. Because of his Arab-sounding name, it was assumed by many that he was an Islamic terrorist. He never was charged in the crime.
All Muslims are highjacking terrorists. Images like the photo below, of a TWA plane highjacked in June 1985, have added to this myth.
All of these statements are part of the FICTION surrounding the Islamic faith.
Matt Flickner / KANSAN
Story by Ian Ritter Art by Matt Hood
April 24,1996
Above are file photos
Weird News
Recent uses of video cameras for surreptitious taping by alleged pervers: According to a a lawsuit filed by a 20-year-old woman, a Reno, Nev., optometrist set up a camera in his ladies' rooms — for "security" purposes, he said in October, Mineola, N.Y., landlord Mark Pearlman was accused in February of having a video camera behind a female tenant's see-through mirror — to enforce his no-smoking policy, he said; and IRS employee Howard
Baltazar was arrested in March after carrying a running video camera in a gym bag through an Oakland, Calif., men's shower room. Police determined that Baltazar committed no crime except eavesdropping via the audio portion of the tape.
Hilltopics
In February, Philippe Delandtischeer, 60, was jailed in Lille, France, for stealing a bottle of a certain anise-flavored alcoholic drink. Authorities think it is the 52nd time that he has been arrested for stealing that product. (As with Otis Campbell in Andy Griffith's Mayberry Jail, a special cell in Lille's jail is
Christopher Norling, 28, was jailed in Milwaukee in February on a charge of fraud after running up a big bill at the Pfister Hotel by pretending to be a National Football League official. He has a long record of similar charges. In a 1900 jailhouse interview, Norling said, "The only thing I know how to do is to con people, to be honest with you. It will probably happen again."
reserved for him.)
James Hogue, 36, was arrested in February as he tried to pass himself off as a Princeton University student, less than five months after his release from prison
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on a charge of trying to pass himself on as a different Princeton student. (In 1990, he studied and ran on the track team as Alexi Indris-Santana until he was exposed by a former high school classmate.)
In February, Diane Currey, 45, was sentenced to nine months in prison after pleading guilty to more than 200 counts of grand theft in Key Largo, Fla. She had embezzled $350,000 from a doctor's office in a seven-year period and then retired to Missouri, where she might have escaped detection forever. However, her replacement in Florida died a
year later, and doctors asked Currey to return. She agreed and immediately began embezzling again but soon was caught.
On Feb. 27 near San Diego an 11-year-old boy who became ill at school was sent home for the day, but when he got home, he shaved off all of his hair, put on a ski mask and a brown, monk's type robe, assembled his father's .22 caller rifle, left home, and began randomly trying to rob people he encountered. He was captured by a security guard who was shot in the hand while trying to wrestle away the gun.
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