Reply #30: In An Impish Spirit, Ma'am

[The Magistrate]

Some of the statements in your No. 5 above are not so outrageous, at least if stripped of their atmospherics.

In my ordinary perambulations about the city, several mosques have been encountered. Two are in former churches; one is in a former dance-club of ill repute. There does not seem to me anything particularly audacious about setting up a mosque in an old and disused church; the facility is designed for the purpose of communal worship, and the denomination formerly operating it must have sold the thing, or leased it, voluntarily.

It does not seem to me that the intellectuals and populace of the Islamic world understand the West much better than the West understands them. Charges of bigotted ignorance could as easily be flung in either direction. Certainly the actions of each towards the other are often counter-productive, due to the ignaorance and lack of understanding on which they are based. These are, after all, general human failings: most consider their ways best, and the rest inferior and wrong in some degree.

Spokespeople for the C.A.I.R. organization have not much impressed me, when seen or read. They have a perfect right to be confrontational, of course, but seem at times to engage in apologias for some the most offensive excesses of Islamic culture, particularly in gender relations, and they are not likely to make much headway here doing so. There certainly is a quotient of bigotry here against Islam, that has incrased recently, and that ought to be fought, but there are also legitimate grounds of disagreement with some Islamic cultural practice, that also can be rightfully expressed.