If you don't know by now, Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, FL, finally followed through with the threat begun last year to burn a copy of the Qur'an (thats CORE-ann for the church's members, I'm sure). The BBC reported on the event in conjunction with its reporting of the subsequent attacks on civilians in Afghanistan on Friday, April 1.
I read the BBC's story, and while they are typically thorough and accurate, they got one thing egregiously wrong. On the Church Profile page the BBC refers to DWOC as "a small evangelical church." Dove is many things, but evangelical, I'm sure, is not one of them. Do I expect religion reporters in another country to understand the particularities of American faith? Not really, but this is a particularly nasty gaffe in light of the content of the story. The BBC could have called Dove a fundamentalist church, a fact that is painfully obvious when reading the church's scant information on their About page. (All that "last days" talk not a dead giveaway, BBC?) If the About page doesn't give it away, perhaps the Store tab could lead you to some amazing finds, like "Islam is of the Devil" book, tee, hat, coffee mug, and a grammatically unfortunate plea: "Help us to stand up for what is right; for the truth of the Bible."
Pastor Terry Jones, who backed off from his threat last year, did not even burn the text himself. That task was carried out by his apparent Renfield, Pastor Wayne Sapp. It matters little who burned the book; it could have been any member of DWOC. I'm not even writing to condemn the stupidity of the act; as Americans, we've grown used to reams of stupidity offered up as exercises in freedom of speech. We've got the Klan, Black Separatists, animal rights activists, environmental terrorists, blood tossing anti-furriers, Rush Limbaugh, and Tea Party gun-toters, so the stupidity isn't localized within one fringe group or one ideology. Also, for every DWOC out there, there are hundreds of actual evangelical churches that would dearly love to mitigate the damage done by one redneck demagogue who apparently uses the name of Jesus to sell a shitty book about a faith he understands even less than the one he allegedly practices.
Is all this to say that Sapp shouldn't have burned it? Of course he shouldn't have. He's supposed to be a follower of Jesus. Am I surprised he burned it? No. Am I appalled? No. I support the exercise of free speech, even ignorant speech. Am I offended for Muslims? No. Nor would I be offended for Christians who witnessed the burning of a copy of the Bible. I find the claims of both faiths equally specious, and I find it even funnier that DWOC actually credits the formation of a sister faith with a plan of the metaphorical embodiment of evil. I don't think metaphors make plans, nor do I think they create faiths. People do that. But the attacks...
I like to remind my Christian friends how Christianity went about the expansion of its own borders 500 years ago. That's the approximate age of Islam right now. Islam has until very recently not grown up in modernity. As with Christianity, when Islam emerges in or enters into modern, post-Enlightenment cultures, the fragmentation into categories of conservative, moderate, and liberal is beginning to emerge. Islam in the U.S. now boasts feminist scholars, non-literalist imams, and the whole host of stock characters we've come to expect from faith's conflict with the demythologizing power of rationality. That's not to say I'm hopeful that the process of Islam becoming more interested in growth through the free exchange of ideas will happen quickly; I only mean to say that all faiths seem to have their violent, even excessively violent, periods. Where Islam meets Christianity in Africa now has been the locus of amazing violence on both sides. The same is true of Hinduism and Islam in northwestern India.
So, is it the responsibility of Muslims around the world to decry these acts? I don't think so. I don't expect my Christian friends in OKC to condemn DWOC's theater of the asinine, and that's because we have this idea that we are all individuals with our own moral culpability. It's best to treat the violent as criminals in an individualistic sense, not as representatives of a faith. That's something Muslim nations can do without infringing on free speech and the free exchange of ideas, and as we have seen in the U.S., without blunting the power or freedom of a particular faith.
