Travel teaches us how to live with Muslims

Jet-lagged and unable to sleep, I awake a few minutes before 5 a.m. and step onto the balcony of my room overlooking Istanbul. Suddenly the colored lights atop minarets all over the city go on, and the voices of a dozen muezzins are heard from loudspeakers resounding all about me. It is the morning call to prayer, a strangely beautiful sound, repeated at four other times throughout the day.
Later, my wife and I board an electric trolley (1 1/2 Turkish lira — about a dollar — per person) to the Sultanahmet district, which houses the Blue Mosque, Aghia Sophia (a Roman Catholic cathedral converted into a mosque, then converted into a museum by the country's early-20th-century president, the secular-minded Ataturk), Topkapi Palace (home of the sultans and their harem-confined concubines) and the stupefying Grand Bazaar of shops extending seemingly for miles.
On the smooth-as-silk, four-car trolley, more modern than any I have ever ridden, we take our seats behind three young women dressed in brightly colored head scarves. One of them speaks a bit of English, and my wife conducts a lively conversation about Istanbul and our respective families, with everyone laughing and smiling.
Also on the trolley: a modern group of young women of Istanbul in totally chic, western dress mixing easily with the others in their traditional Muslim cloaks. As we move along, we glance at the passing sidewalks filled with a variety of people, the majority in gowns and suits as modern as in London or Paris, but with a healthy number of head-scarved women and an occasional ultra-traditional female in head-to-foot black chadors, leaving only a small space for their noses and eyes. Everyone mixes and mingles, and conducts their daily routines in relaxed fashion, showing total tolerance for each other.
Later in the day, I pass the jogging track of an in-city park where young women in shorts and other modern running gear, their hair in ponytails, are exercising alongside other equally athletic young women in head scarves and long dresses.
It is now late in the afternoon. After a strenuous day of mosque- and museum-hopping, my wife and I pass an alleyway on which we see a large Turkish sign with the smaller words "Turkish baths" underneath. We enter the most un-touristic establishment in all the city, where only sign language indicates to the surprised proprietors that we Yanks are each eager to experience these intensely local treatments (40 lira, about $25, per person).
I get undressed and am conducted into a searingly hot steam room where I am soon drenched in sweat and made to endure the heat for nearly half an hour. I am then rubbed down with what is close to sandpaper, then doused with buckets of cold, tepid and hot water in succession, then covered with soap. And then I undergo the most painful massage of my life, the masseur's thumbs digging deep into every muscle I possess. And after a final wash, I am wrapped into a towel and escorted to a reception room where I meet my also towel-draped wife, who has had everything except the steam treatment. We are each served a tiny glass of heavily sweetened Turkish tea. The proprietors of the steam bath beam at us, who probably are the first tourists they have ever served.
For the entire day we have been in a Muslim world, a part of it (namely Turkey) a tolerant land set on a course of modernity by its former military ruler, Ataturk. We are going to have to learn to live with that world, to deal with them as equals, to react to them with tolerance and sensitivity for their beliefs and their struggles. We cannot patronize or dominate them, as we have sometimes have in the past.

The Wichita Eagle

Father Ted creators back challenge to the blasphemy bill

The creators of the Father Ted television series have denounced Ireland's proposed blasphemy laws as "insanity" and pledged to support a campaign to repeal them.
Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan backed moves by a group of Irish secularists to challenge the bill against blasphemy introduced in the Dáil last week. Atheist Ireland said this weekend that it will publish a statement blaspheming all the major religions in Ireland, including Christianity and Islam. The group said it would be a calculated challenge to the law.
Under the Irish constitution, the state is obliged to have blasphemy laws. The bill going through the Dáil would amend the Defamation Act of 1961, which includes blasphemy as a crime. To abolish blasphemy laws, the government would have to hold a referendum to amend the constitution. The duo, who wrote a host of other TV comedies such as Big Train, described the blasphemy law contained in the new bill covering defamation in Ireland as "a return to the Middle Ages".
Linehan told the Observer that the justice minister Dermot Ahern, who introduced the bill, should be challenged to define what he meant by blasphemy. "This is insanity. Please, Mr Ahern, define the things we can't say, please! Can we say, 'Jesus is gay'? Or can we ask, 'Is God in a biscuit?' Could he tell us what it means? It is just insanity. After all, there are things contained in the holy books of one religion that are blasphemy to another religion. The logic behind this comes from Alice in Wonderland." He said the Irish blasphemy law was part of a trend in the west where freedom of expression was being attacked "to placate the craziest people on earth".
Linehan said that technically, under the new bill, certain scenes from Father Ted could be deemed blasphemous. "In Ted we kind of generally avoided central tenets of belief, because it was not what the show was about. It was about a very bad priest who didn't think about religion a lot. Writers should not be looking over their shoulders. If you are writing a satire today, the Irish government are making it harder to do that."
Mathews said the bill "hardly seems necessary in the Ireland of the 21st century ... It's a pity that law hadn't been introduced when we were writing Father Ted, because it would have given us a great storyline. The best attitude to this nonsense is to laugh at it and send it up. There is no popular clamour for it in Ireland, so I wonder why Dermot Ahern has brought it in the first place."
Michael Nugent, of Atheist Ireland, who has also written comedy with Mathews, said the bill was silly and dangerous. "It is silly because it revives a medieval religious law in a modern pluralist republic, and it makes Ireland seem like a backward country. People need protection. Ideas do not. Ideas should always be open to criticism and ridicule. If the law is passed, we will be immediately testing it by publishing a blasphemous statement."
Nugent pointed out that in 1909 George Bernard Shaw had a play banned for blasphemy. "He defended himself by saying he deliberately wrote immoral and heretical plays in order to challenge the public to reconsider its morals. Exactly 100 years later, we will be doing the same thing: deliberately publishing a blasphemous statement, in order to challenge the government to reconsider this absurd law."
Mathews said he supported Nugent's stance on publishing blasphemy and predicted a Life of Brian-style fate for his old friend. "Ideally I'd like to see Mick stoned to death for the crime of blasphemy. It would be tough to see him go, but I would be turning up to the stoning just for the sheer fun of it," he said. Mathews may be about to get into trouble himself - not over blasphemy but his new take on the Irish famine. His latest film, to be released in August, stars Fr Dougal, aka Ardal O'Hanlon, from Father Ted, and is set in a famine theme park in the Republic that includes a cafe for tourists. O'Hanlon, playing a drifter who gets a job in the theme park, has to dress up as a starving Irish peasant from the 1840s.
Atheist Ireland meanwhile said it would finalise plans for a blasphemous statement at its annual meeting, which is open to the public, in Wynns Hotel in Dublin next Saturday. Under the new law, anyone found guilty of blasphemy in the wider Defamation Act can be fined up to €25,000 (£21,400).

Henry McDonald.