Mormons<\/a> are really Christians, you might want to put on your critical thinking cap.\u201d<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I hope you\u2019ve already put it on, so that you won\u2019t be taken in by Ms. Wood\u2019s garbled misinformation.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt rarely is the religion but the candidate\u2019s behavior that determines if she or he is a good person,\u201d Ms. Wood concludes, \u201cand that is what Americans really care about, but getting a bit snowed is getting a bit old, don\u2019t you think?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yes, it had already grown a bit old by the time she published her article in 2012. \u00a0So one has to wonder why Ms. Wood was still attempting to snow people. \u00a0My suspicion, given the fact that Islam worries and even terrifies many Americans, is that she\u2019 was attempting, in a not very subtle and not very ethical way, to demonize Mormonism and to damage Mitt Romney by linking them with Muslims and terrorism. \u00a0Which, if true, was both disingenuous and irresponsible.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
P.S. \u00a0I note that, in one of her responses to the comments following her article, Ms. Wood asserted that both Muslims and Mormons consider themselves Christians. \u00a0This is absolutely, flatly, unambiguously false. \u00a0Muslims do not claim to be Christians, any more than Jews, Hindus, Buddhists or Sikhs do. \u00a0Islam, though plainly part of what might be called the Abrahamic tradition \u2014 Arab Muslims often term Judaism, Christianity, and Islam together al-adyan al-samawiyya<\/em> (\u201cthe heavenly religions\u201d) \u2014 is a separate and distinct faith and does not claim otherwise.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
P.P.S. \u00a0A friend has written to suggest that I be explicit about my qualifications to comment on Mormonism and Islam together, and perhaps I should: \u00a0I\u2019m a Mormon or Latter-day Saint myself, a former missionary and an ordained bishop in the Church, and a rather extensively published author on Mormon topics (including a book, Offenders for a Word: How Anti-Mormons Play Word Games to Attack the Latter-day Saints<\/em>, on whether Mormons are Christians). \u00a0I\u2019m also a professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University, the Church\u2019s flagship school. \u00a0I\u2019ve lived in Jerusalem for a year and in Cairo for four years, and visit the Middle East and the Islamic world every year (so far during the past twelve months, on three separate occasions). \u00a0I hold a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in Arabic and Islamic intellectual history; teach courses on Arabic, Middle Eastern history, and Islam; founded and, for years, edited a series of dual-language classical Islamic texts that was distributed by the University of Chicago Press; and, among a fairly large number of other relevant things, have published a biography of Muhammad.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Cairo, Egypt<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 Finishing up my comments on a 2012 Huffington Post article by one Eliza Wood: \u00a0 \u201cAll three of these faiths,\u201d writes Ms. Wood of Islam, her brand of Christianity, and the Mormon brand of Christianity (which she seeks to exclude from Christendom), \u201chave scores of excellent people, possibly some who would make excellent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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