How much fun — really — can you make of religion?  A U.S. marketer of board games may find out with ”Playing Gods” which it calls “the world’s first satirical board game of religious warfare.” It had its European premier this week at the London Toy Fair and will make a U.S. debut at the New York Toy Fair in February.

Ben Radford, head of the company that put the game together, said in a news release it is designed for two to five players who act as “gods” and …

“Try try to take over the world and make everyone on Earth worship him or her. As a god, you can try to convert other gods’ followers, promising them things like Afterlife, Prosperity, and Miracles. Or you can kill them off with plagues, locusts, earthquakes, floods, and other Acts of Gods.

“Watch out, though, because bad things can happen to good gods—one of your vicars is caught with a prostitute? Too bad, you lose a sect!

“Players can pit Christians against Muslims and Hindus against Jews, or be the mascot, a machine-gun-toting Buddha. Players may choose to be any god from Jesus to Moses, from Cthulu to Zeus, from the Cult of Oprah to the Almighty Dollar. (And yes, there is a Muslim figure.) Though the theme includes religious battles, it is really a satire with an underlying message of peace, encouraging people to think about the tragedy of killing others just because they have different beliefs.”

It costs about $40, and German, French, Spanish and Portuguese versions are available in preparation for the European launch. Information is available at http://www.PlayingGods.com. Radford says the gods seem to be smiling anyway — he’s selling about 10 games a day.

Of all the things to get exercised about, yoga would seem to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. But such has been the case in Malaysia this week.

Malaysia’s prime minister declared on Wednesday that Muslims can after all practice the Indian exercise regime, so long as they avoid the meditation and chantings that reflect Hindu philosophy. This came after Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council told Muslims to roll up their exercise mats and stop contorting their limbs because yoga could destroy the faith of Muslims.

It has been a tough month for the fatwa council chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, who in late October issued an edict against young women wearing trousers, saying that was a slippery path to
lesbianism. Gay sex is outlawed in Malaysia.

The council’s rulings, and other religious controversies, might at first blush seem to indicate a growing strain of conservative Islam in mostly Muslim Malaysia. But it could also
reflect the growing unease of Islamic authorities in defending the faith in a rapidly modernising Malaysia where non-Muslims constitute 40 percent of the population and are increasingly
asserting their rights.

The yoga fatwa stirred up a hornet’s next, not only in the blogosphere where that could be expected, but in another deeply conservative Malaysian institution — the sultans.  Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who presides ceremonially over the central state of Selangor, said Abdul’s fatwa council should have consulted the nine hereditary Malay rulers who take turns being Malaysia’s king before announcing the ruling.  The highly unusual comment from one of the sultans on a
policy matter suggests some discord about who speaks for Malaysia’s Muslims on matters of faith. Islam is the official religion in multi-religious Malaysia and the constitution designates the nine sultans as guardians of the faith. The (rotating) king is the head of Islam in Malaysia.

The sultans, for their part, have seen what remains of their secular powers eroded over the years, particularly under the two-decade administration of former prime minister Mahathir
Mohamad. They could be defending a last bastion of royal prerogoative in the religious arena.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badaw, who has been preaching a moderate brand of Islam called Islam Hadhari, moved to contain the damage saying Muslims can do exercises like the “sun
salutation” so long as they don’t start chanting.

The fatwa council’s rulings, in any case, are not legally binding until they are adopted as national laws or sharia (Islamic) laws in individual states. There seems to be little appetite for that. No laws have been made against young women wearing trousers. The government in May dropped a proposal to restrict women from travelling abroad by themselves after a storm of derision from women activist groups.

But even as the flap over yoga is relaxing, the government is crossing swords with Christian groups.

A Christian federation  claimed Bibles were seized at entry points earlier this year. Malaysian Catholics are having an ontological argument with the authorities about the word “Allah”.
The government banned the Malay-language section of a Catholic weekly newspaper from using the word, saying it creates confusion among Muslims. Catholics say Allah is simply the Arabic word for
“God”, and has long been used in Malay-language Bibles. (A Dutch bishop has stirred debate in Europe with a similar argument)

Non-muslims, who constitute 40 percent of Malaysia’s population, sometimes worry that things such as the fuss over fatwas and words for God, may augur a mini-clash of civilisations in Malaysia, which last year saw a harsh crackdown on Indian rights protesters. It was one year ago that 10,000 ethnic Indians defied tear gas and waterr cannon to voice complaints of racial and religious discrimination in its biggest ever anti-government street protest.

Did the “Bali bombers” end up as martyrs or monsters? That’s what many must be wondering after the three young men convicted of the Bali nighclub bombings in October 2002 were executed in the dead of the night last weekend in an orange grove on Java.

(Photo: Funeral of bomber Imam Samudra, 11 Nov 2008/Supri)

The run-up to the executions turned into a media circus. The three men from the Jemaah Islamiah group – Imam Samudra, Mukhlas, and Amrozi — were interviewed extensively by domestic and foreign media before they faced a firing squad last Sunday. They were defiant to the end, calling for more attacks like the one they perpetrated that killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists. They had, in fact, become media celebrities and the public was fascinated with them. But as monsters or martyrs?

Mainstream Indonesia was nervous and unhappy about the public spectacle that “infuriated relatives of the victims and prolonged their pain”, the Jakarta Post said.

Foreign Minister Hasan Wirajuda said the executions should not have been so publicised. “Perhaps that’s the cross we have to bear in an open and democratic Indonesia,” he said, using an interesting metaphor when speaking about Islamists. Thousands of people poured onto the streets for the funerals after the bodies were flown by helicopter to their home towns. People chanted “Goodbye Syuhada (heroes)” and “allahu akbar” as the bodies of Mukhlas and Amrozi were taken to an Islamic boarding school where Jemaah Islamiah’s spiritual leader Abu Bakr Bashir led prayers.

The feared revenge attacks have not taken place, though Australia said it has credible information that militants may be planning some. Jemaah said the Bali attacks were intended to deter foreigners as part of drive to make Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, part of a larger Islamic caliphate.

(Photo: Protester and poster of bombers, 9 Nov 2008/Beawiharta)

But leaders of the two main Muslim organisations — Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah who together account for nearly three-quarters of Indonesia’s 230 million people — know there is very little support for that among the Indonesian people who generally practice a tolerant brand of Islam.

“The bombers show a wrong nature of Islam,” Din Syamsuddin, chairman of Muhammadiyah told the Jakarta Post. “The use of violence and attacks cannot be tolerated in our religion. “Glorifying the three Bali bombers as mujahid is a grave mistake. It stems from a delusion that such an honor can be achieved through bombings and shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great),” said Masdar F. Mas’udi, deputy chairman of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU).

The Bali bombers were clearly hoping their executions would give them the status of martyrs. But the classic definition of that in both Christianity and Islam are those who died defending their faith against their persecutors — not waging an unprovoked attack on an unsuspecting population to further a vision of an Islamic caliphat in Southeast Asia.

Will the Bali Bombers go down in Muslim history as heroes or martyrs? Or will they be seen as deluded young men who were induced to commit mass murder in a time of post-911 madness?

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Following are some Reuters videos from the funeral and protests against the executions:

Here’s a slideshow of pictures from the bombings to the execution of the bombers.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, has made statements in the past that made him sound quite sceptical about the value of a theological dialogue with Muslims.

(Photo: Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran)

That wasn’t what I found when I interviewed him last Saturday at his office on Via della Conciliazione, just down the road from St. Peter’s Basilica. The subject was the Catholic-Muslim Forum he had just hosted on Nov 4-6 between a Muslim delegation from the Common Word group and Catholic delegation of Vatican officials, Catholic Islam scholars and bishops from western and Muslim countries.

The Common Word group, he said, could become a “favoured channel” for Vatican contacts with Muslims, even while it retains other channels of dialogue. While he still had some reservations about the group’s approach because of differences he sees in ways of reading scriptures, he was quite positive about the actual dialogue itself. “In discussing the love of God, we were doing theology unintentionally,” he said. That jibed with a point that Muslim delegates made during the session itself. “I thought they didn’t want to discuss theology but we’ve been doing that from the start,” University of Cambridge Islamic studies lecturer Tim Winter remarked halfway though the conference.

The cardinal said he felt the most important part of the final communique was item number 5: “Genuine love of neighbour implies respect of the person and her or his choices in matters of conscience and religion. It includes the right of individuals and communities to practice their religion in private and public.” The public part is the key, since that could help Christian minorities in Muslim countries. It could also help Muslim minorities in western countries, which is why Muslim delegation head Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric persuaded the doubters in his ranks to accept it. Several Muslim delegates told me they most appreciated the next item, which reads: “Religious minorities are entitled to be respected in their own religious convictions and practices. They are also entitled to their own places of worship, and their founding figures and symbols they consider sacred should not be subject to any form of mockery or ridicule.” Tauran had more to say about this in the interview.

Tauran also said there were now too many different Christian-Muslim dialogues and he saw a risk that they could start tripping over each other. Here’s my news story on the interview.

Edited Q&A of Tauran interview: Due to some software glitches, you need to do the following to get to the second page of this post — click on the headline, then click on the page number “2″ below.  Page 2 includes Tauran’s closing remarks at the end of the conference.

Pages: 1

Christian churches have been taking stock of where they stand on dialogue with Islam. With so much interfaith discussion going on, they’re not all singing from the same sheet and wonder whether they should (or even could). So about 50 church leaders and experts got together near Geneva last weekend to exchange information on their approach to, and experiences concerning, dialogue with Muslims. “With such a succession of meetings where we get together with Muslims, we wanted to have a meeting among ourselves and ask whether we have 2,000 different answers and what that might say about us,” said Thomas Schirrmacher of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA).

The World Council of Churches (WCC) said the idea for the meeting“emerged from an ecumenical process of response to the Common Word”  initiative on Christian-Muslim dialogue. Held outside Geneva, it brought together representatives from the WCC, World Evangelical Alliance, Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Communion, Lutheran World Federation, World Alliance of Reformed Churches, World Methodist Council, several Orthodox churches and other Christian groups. I have spoken to a few of the participants and received some texts since the meeting to get an idea of how their exchange shaped up.

“The idea was that we come together to share our different experiences with Islam and our different theological approaches to Islam to seek an ecumenical understanding,” said Rima Barsoum, the WCC’s person responsible for relations with Muslims. An “ecumenical understanding” does not mean a common understanding, as became clear at the meeting. Participants described various points of view that no two-day meeting could overcome. Orthodox and eastern churches that live as minorities in Muslim countries have a different perspective from those in the West that know Muslims as a minority. The Vatican’s approach is to focus more on the theological questions while the World Evangelical Alliance has stressed the issue of living together peacefully. “My feeling after Geneva is that there is such a wide spectrum of representation that a common stand would be very difficult indeed,” said David Thomas, professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham in Britain.

Catholicos Aram I, the Beirut-based head of the Armenian Apostolic Church(See of Cilicia), displayed that view of minority Christians in the Middle East in his opening speech. “The prevailing misperceptions, ambiguities, polarisations, tensions and collision (of values between Muslims and Christians), hijacked and sharpened by politico-ideological agendas and geo-political strategies, can be transformed only through a shared life in community,”he said. Josiah Atkins Idowu-Fearon, former Anglican bishop of Kaduna, gave a run-down on the often tense relations between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria: “Our biggest problem is that of ignorance: both communities are ignorant of their religion and that of their neighbour.”

Rev. Dan Madigan S.J.warned in his presentation against trying to fit the Abrahamic religions into a standard schema with pre-determined categories. This often leads to parallels between the Koran and the Bible or Mohammad and Jesus, he said, but this was a category mistake. “The most important common belief our traditions share is that the Word of God has been spoken in our world — the eternal divine word that is the essence of God,” he said. However, Jews hear the word of God in the Torah and rabbinic reflection and study. Muslims hear it in the Koran. “For Christians, on the other hand, God’s word is spoken primarily, not in words, but in the flesh … What Jesus is for the Christian, the Koran (not Mohammad) is for Muslims. What Mohammad is for Muslims (the human channel through which the word of God entered the world), Mary could be said to be for Christians. Of course, that Mary role does not exhaust the reality of who Mohammad is for Muslims.”

Rev. Peter Colwell of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland told me Madigan’s comments were “quite a revelatory observation for many participants. I think you’ve got to come out of the Catholic or Orthodox tradition to actually see that.” BTW Colwell has produced a short guide to the Common Word as “a resource for churches and individuals who wish to explore these issues more deeply and who wish take the opportunity the letter affords to develop local inter-faith relations.”

Schirrmacher said several church representatives asked him why the World Evangelical Alliance gave such a quick and positive reply to the Common Word invitation to dialogue while issuing quite a critical note analysing the content of the Common Word statement. “There’s a simple answer,” he said. “The WEA was founded in 1854 on the issue of freedom of religion. For us, agreeing on content and sitting down under the roof of religious freedom to live together peacefully are two different issues. We could sign on immediately to this peace offer — which is what it is, they’re saying they want to live peacefully with Christians in the world –- without taking much time to think about which consequences that may have for the Trinity or whatever. This is tougher for the Catholic Church because they have not conducted the dialogue politically, but from the basis of having the same God and wanting to talk about theological issues. The Orthodox churches, which have always been minority churches and persecuted, had no problem with the evangelical approach because the theological and political issues are separate for them.”

A second meetingwas held in Mechelen near Brussels in mid-week, this time with Muslims. Some church delegates went directly from one meeting to the other. This one was less focused on interfaith dialogue as such, but did mention in its final statement: “As Muslims and Christians we call for mutual learning through opening up of mosques and churches to visitors from other communities and also to learning through engagement of people. This includes scholarly encounter and academic interaction. We need to get into the spirit of religions, as well as their outer clothing. We pledge ourselves to avoid generalisations about the other.”

“We need to get into the spirit of religions, as well as their outer clothing…” – that’s an interesting way of putting it.

The Christian-Muslim dialogue trains continues to roll. The next stop is the Vatican on November 4 and 5, when about 25 signatories of the Common Word will meet Pope Benedict, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran and other interfaith experts of the Roman Catholic Church.

Does Sony need a full-time religious affairs adviser? Someone who says “that’s OK” or “whoa, don’t go there!” It looks like they could use one, judging by its decision to recall and remaster its Playstation 3 video game LittleBigPlanet because it might offend Muslims. LittleBigPlanet was supposed to be one of the biggest releases of the season. And then Sony found out some background music had a few phrases from the Koran in it and they decided to replace the disks with different music. An in-house religion maven who does some “content debugging” would cost much less than this embarrassing exercise.

Sony isn’t the only company to trip over religious sensitivities. Microsoft had to withdraw its Xbox fighter game Kakuto Chojin; Back Alley Brutal in 2003 because of Koran verses chanted in the background. Back in 1998, Muslims accused Nike of sacrilege for selling sneakers bearing a logo showing the word “air” written in fiery letters that looked like the Arabic word “Allah.” Nike ended up withdrawing the shoes, giving sensitivity training to employees and building playgrounds at several mosques in Virginia.

Muslims haven’t been the only ones complaining. A French jeans poster showing women imitating Jesus Christ and his apostles in the Leonardo da Vinci painting, “The Last Supper”, was banned in France and Italy after Catholics there complained. A leading anti-Semitism watchdog howled last spring when a South Korean cosmetics company advertised a skin lotion with a picture of a young woman sporting what appears to be a Nazi officer’s hat.

Not all protests work. Sony refused to withdraw another PS3 game, Resistance: Fall of Man, despite legal threats from the Church of England against shoot-’em-up scenes in a virtual representation of Manchester Cathedral. The company argued the game was fantasy sci-fi and that historical buildings were often used in fiction. In the end, it issued an apology last year but did not withdraw or change the game. And the publicity seems to have boosted sales…

What’s interesting here is that these are products that marketing departments presumably signed off on. They’re not organisations printing potentially provocative material, such as the Prophet Mohammad cartoons or The Jewel of Medina, as a statement on freedom of speech. These companies want to sell their products and either don’t see the possible offence or think the provocation can help sales.

What would the job description for religious affairs adviser to a large international consumer products corporation look like? Here are a few points the adviser would probably have to address:

1. Should companies simply avoid any reference to Islam at all? That would seem like the safest way to go, but as the Sony and Nike cases show, it is not always clear that such a reference has even been made. And some Muslims are not offended by references that others decry as sacreligious. Which Islamic authority should you consult to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not?

2 . How far can you push Christians? Lampooning Christians is widespread and certainly sells books, as Richard Dawkins could tell you. Most Christians don’t bother to threaten legal action in response. When the Church of England did, Sony toughed that one out. But there is growing talk about “Christianophobia” and some churches seem more ready to fight back. Will this become more of a minefield in the future?

3. What about Jews and Israel? What is anti-Semitic and what is not? Can you use a Jewish joke in an ad? Should your company or institution divest in Israel over its policies towards the Palestinians?

4. What about images from India? India is a treasure trove of exotic images, especially in its Hindu temples and religious festivals. But what do the symbols mean? Should any be avoided because they might offend others or be linked to the nasty fringe of Hindu nationalism?

5. At least Buddhism presents no problems, right? Well, you never know how the China vs. the Dalai Lama issue will work out. What if a company made DVDs or even some kind of interactive game about reaching spiritual enlightenment that included images of the Dalai Lama. How would Beijing react? Could it be commercially significant?

6. Can we ignore protests from religions X,Y or Z because they’re too small to upset our sales? Hmmm…

Send in any other questions you think a corporate religion specialist would face. My last one is — how much should a company pay someone who can get the answers right without cutting into sales?

UPDATE: MTV quotes the musician of the disputed song, Toumani Diabaté, as saying that quoting the Koran is  his “way to attract and inspire people toward Islam.” Diabaté is a Muslim from Mali. The MTV report includes comments from two Muslims explaining that “there is no explicit rule in Islam prohibiting a song like Diabate’s.”

The answer is Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. At least that was the conclusion of the latest Pew Research Institute survey of attitudes about religion around the world — a look at 24 countries based on thousands of interviews. Indonesia came in first with 99 percent of the population rating religion as important or very important in their lives — and it topped everyone else in the “very important” slot at 95 percent. Beyond that 80 percent of those surveyed in Indonesia say they pray five times a day every day — adhering to one of the five pillars of Islam.

Indeed Islam is well represented in the top five countries where religion is valued in life — with Tanzania, Jordan, Pakistan and Nigeria following Indonesia.

At the bottom of the chart was France, where only 10 percent saw religion as very important and 60 percent said they never pray.

Indeed the wealthier, more developed nations in the world seem to care less about religion. Does that means circumstances trump faith? Or does it say more about the kind of faith involved? The Pew report drew few conclusions on that front but did say that Muslims consistently rated religion as central to their lives. By one estimate every fourth person on the planet is a Muslim, many living in some of its poorest quarters.

One anomaly in the new report involves the United States — and it may help explain to puzzled outsiders why faith is often wrapped in the the flag when it comes to politics and elections. In the list of countries rating the importance of religion, America, wealth not withstanding, lands about in the middle — with 55 percent saying religion is very important. That compares, for example, to 13 percent in Japan, 18 percent in Britain and 22 percent in Germany. In addition, 33 percent of Americans say they pray at least once a day, and only 11 percent say they never do.

Italy may soon say “basta” (enough!) to new mosques. The far-right Northern League party, allies of centre-right Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, wants to limit the growth of Islam in the centre of world Catholicism by blocking the construction of mosques through strict new regulations. My feature on this — “Italy’s right to curb Islam with mosque law” — outlines the proposed legislation.

One thing that struck me while researching the story was how much work the author of the draft law, Andrea Gibelli, seems to have done preparing this law. He quoted the Koran in Arabic, cited the legal systems of various Arab countries and said he had read “200 books” on the subject.  He also gave a clue to some of the thinking behind the draft legislation when he told us that he had been helped in his understanding of Islam by friends from the Middle East. It turns out they were Lebanese Druze and Coptic Christians from Egypt, members of minorities whose opinions may be coloured by their long and not always harmonious relations with Muslims.

The Northern League does not mince words — for example, it once advised the use of gunboats to scare off would-be illegal immigrants. Roberto Calderoli, now a cabinet minister, once walked his pet pig on a proposed mosque site to defile the soil there and  wore a T-shirt with a Danish caricature of the Prophet Mohammad, triggering riots in Libya. Gibelli’s bottom line was that building mosques in Italy at the current rate of expansion was a form of cultural colonisation. He said mosques “are often places of cultural indoctrination, sometimes linked to international terrorism.” They get in the way of Muslims integrating into Italy’s Catholic culture, he said. Anyway, he finally said, Muslims don’t really need them as the Koran states that they can “pray anywhere.”

Apart from Rome, whose Grand Mosque is a strong contender for the title of Europe’s biggest mosque, Muslims in Italy certainly do have to “pray anywhere” at the moment. Many local communities, and not just those with Northern League mayors, have found ways to block the construction of new places of Islamic worship. Even Italy’s business capital Milan has no proper mosque. Thousands of Muslims have been forced to pray on the pavement outside a converted garage known as the “Jenner Street mosque.” But  local authorities have decided this was too disruptive and moved them to a velodrome, where local media say the Muslims are charged for entry as if they were going to watch a race.

The left-leaning La Repubblica newspaper asked last week if, with many Muslims in the League’s north-east strongholds forced to worship “in hiding” during the current Ramadan, the current centre-right government was respecting the constitutional right to freedom of worship. Il Giornale, the paper owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s brother, reported on a “revolt against the mosques” in the north east. In the Veneto and Friuli regions, it said, about 150,000 Muslims who already have 40 prayer halls are asking for more, to the consternation of local communities.

Tensions concerning construction of new mosques have been reported from around Europe. What do you think about the way Italy is dealing with the issue?

“Comfortable candor” is the way Leith Anderson described the atmosphere at the Common Word conference on Christian-Muslim dialogue that ended at Yale University on Thursday. The term is as interesting for its image as for the person who used it. Anderson is president of the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals and one of several evangelicals attending the meeting. Among the mostly Protestant leaders who responded to the Common Word dialogue appeal in a letter launched by Yale Divinity School, evangelicals tended to be more cautious and more concerned about pointing out the fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam. Even with those reservations , these participants faced some criticism in their own ranks for attending and came to the conference not knowing how open it would be.

Anderson told me on the first day that he appreciated how forthright the discussion was, with each side standing up for its beliefs while seeking common ground where they could. In his keynote address in the final session, he put his stamp of approval on the process: “Our differences are deep and real. Sometimes those differences are cultural or ethnic or racial. But I have been especially impressed this week with the comfortable candor with which Muslims and Christians have clearly stated their own doctrines to one another.”

Geoff Tunnicliffe, international director of the World Evangelical Alliance, made the same point in his address. “We can affirm the appropriateness of simply engaging in dialogue and conversation with each other at this critical time in history. It is right that we’re together. We can affirm the development of new and strengthened relationships. It has been good to sit together and build new friendships. We can affirm the genuine spirit of being willing to listen to each other and seeking to gain understanding into each others’ perspectives.”

Some Christians in dialogue sessions like this seem ready to blur theological distinctions for the sake of harmony with Muslims. By contrast, evangelicals are steadfast in proclaiming their belief in Jesus and the Bible (as Anderson did repeatedly in his keynote address). As steadfast, in fact, as the Muslims are in proclaiming their faith in the Koran and the prophethood of Mohammad. So if they can approve a dialogue project like this, it must be doing something right.

Another theme in the two speeches was the diversity of the evangelical movement. Anderson stressed that the NAE covered 61 denominations and hundreds of evangelical organisations. The majority of evangelicals live in the Global South, he stressed, and much of the recent growth of evangelical Christianity in the United States came from immigrants. “We are not about politics or power or money or culture,” he said. As he said that, I wondered whether the Arabic interpreters were tempted to translate that as “they are not all George Bush’s allies.” Tunnicliffe even said one thing evangelicals certainly had in common with Muslims was the experience of being “stereotyped and stigmatized in the media” and invited them to look beyond cliches about evangelicals.

Anderson also noted that he was no stranger to contacts with Muslims even if this kind of theological dialogue was “not part of our normal repertoire,” as David Neff, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today (and fellow conference blogger) put it when we spoke. The NAE held a meeting on creation care and climate change with North African Muslim leaders, the World Bank and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Washington in June and Anderson addressed an interfaith dialogue meeting in Qatar in May. “And that’s just the last 60 days…” he remarked.

Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, made a similar point about explaining the diversity of American Christianity to foreign Muslims when we spoke just before the Yale conference started. “When we U.S. Muslims hear Muslims in other parts of the world talk about the crusading spirit of contemporary America, the problem of the conflation of religion and politics in America and how that effects Muslim life and aspirations, we try to explain to them that the American political process is complicated, American Christianity is diverse and there are many different political opinions even among very devoted Christians. This is something that it’s important to have them understand … I think it’s important (for them) to have this opportunity to hear a more nuanced perspective on how American Christians look at the importance of their faith for motivating their sense of social justice and the involvement they have in certain issues.”

That the evangelical movement is not simply the Republican Party at prayer has made its way into the newspapers in recent years, especially on environmental issues. Do you think this message of dialogue and cooperation with Muslims has been heard?

A French Muslim who blocked a male doctor from performing an emergency caeserian on his wife has lost his bid to sue the hospital because his son was born handicapped, according to French press and radio reports. The court also ordered him to pay the court costs — €1,000 ($1,550) — because he kept the doctor from “performing the tests that could have prevented the serious neurological complications” that occurred. Coming shortly after the “virginity lie” controversy, this case has once again raised the question of if and how to accommodate religious demands from Muslims in France.

The law in French state hospitals is clear. Women can request women doctors and probably get them most of the time. But if the attending doctor that night is a man, as happened in this case, the woman — and in this case, her husband — have to accept that. When this woman went into labour in November 1998, the couple rushed to a hospital in Bourg-en-Bresse and a midwife examined her. She recognised a complication and called the doctor, but the husband physically blocked him for half an hour because he did not want a strange man touching his wife. By the time he gave in, it was too late for a caeserian and the baby had to be delivered by foreceps. Little Mohammed is now 100% handicapped.

The father sued the hospital for €100,000 in damages and €10,000 in personal compensation. The court rejected this and blamed the father, saying: “The child’s state is totally attributable to the attitude of Mr. Radouane Ijjou.”

The issue of Muslims demanding exceptions at state hospitals has been an issue in France since 2003, when the Stasi Commission (whose hearings led to the headscarf ban in state schools) heard doctors say a growing number of Muslim men refused to let male doctors treat their wives. There were stories of fistfights between husbands and doctors — including one non-fatal stabbing — and husbands driving from emergency room to emergency room searching for a female doctor to treat a wife in desperate need of medical attention. But while these stories appeared from time to time in the media, it was hard to get clear facts on specific cases. My impression was that there was a definate problem, with some very worrying cases, but it was not as widespread as the French media seemed to say it was.

This is a clear case that has gone through the legal system. I think the judge was 100% correct in not only rejecting this suit but throwing the blame back on that irresponsible father’s shoulders. He — and his wife, and especially his son — is the victim of a kind of folk Islam that confused cultural traditions with faith. Several Muslim scholars and chaplains I spoke to while researching other cases said they could have given him a litany of Koran quotes to prove that his wife’s and son’s health came first. One doctor I met once had the Paris Grand Mosque fax over a fatwa to convince a Muslim couple to perform an emergency abortion.

Have you seen cases of faith vs. health care clashes in your local media? Do they look like hearsay or are they well sourced? I think this is less serious than it’s made out to be, but when it’s serious — like in this case — it can be tragic.