It is a sign of their devotion when Muslims bow 5 times a day towards Mecca and pray to their God.See anything weird? Let's try a little substitution:
...when Christians pray to their God.It's quite unlikely that ABC news would ever air a statement like that. Because the God that Jews and Christians pray to is just: God. "God" here is a proper name, and identifies its referent quite nicely without anyone having to stick a possessive adjective in front of it. In fact, maybe I should remove that capitalization:
...when Jews pray to their God.
It is a sign of their devotion when Muslims bow 5 times a day towards Mecca and pray to their god.Yep, that's starting to look icky.
So by identifying the object of Muslim prayer as "their god", the article (which is meant to address anti-Muslim prejudice) also perpetuates a kind of anti-Muslim prejudice, by suggesting that Muslims worship some freakish alien deity completely unrelated to the one that normal people worship.
This was probably unintentional. As Slacktivist has noted on occasion, journalists tend to be pretty much clueless when it comes to issues of religion. But there are people who really do think that Allah is something entirely distinct from God; some Christians even think that Allah is Satan or some such. Hearing this sort of thing on the news isn't helping matters.
1 comment:
Interesting post. I think most Americans, including journalists, are so clueless about Islam that they just don't know how to talk about it in an intelligent manner. That includes me. I am trying to learn more, but....
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