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Prayer organizers disinvite Muslim
BEAVERTON, Oregon, April 24, 2004 -- Organizers of the annual Mayors' Prayer Breakfast of Washington County have voted to bar a local Muslim leader from offering a prayer at the event, leading Beaverton Mayor Rob Drake and other city officials to say they'll skip the May 5 event.
"It's just broken my heart," Drake said Friday of the organizing group's decision this week to renege on an invitation for Shahriar Ahmed, president of the Bilal Mosque Association in Beaverton, to sit on the dais and give the concluding prayer as previously scheduled. "I thought we had found openness and the ability to honor diversity," said Drake, mayor since 1993.
He explained that because of a controversy about the event's inclusiveness last year, he had invited Ahmed and Rabbi David Rosenberg of Portland's Congregation Shaarie Torah to help diversify the 19th annual prayer breakfast.
Rosenberg said he also would not attend the breakfast. "I don't want to see this kind of thing, where somebody's blackballed," the rabbi said.
The Oregonian Editorial - April 28, 2004
'Breakfast Club' shouldn't exclude Islam
After reading Richard Colby's report about this controversy within the Portland area's religious community ("Prayer organizers disinvite Muslim," Metro section, April 24), I was truly shocked. In a time when we are supposed to be teaching religious tolerance and understanding, it is sad to see the organizers of the "Mayors' Prayer Breakfast of Washington County" acting in such an uncivilized manner.
Unfortunately, even though Islam is rightfully included under the umbrella of the "Three Abrahamic Faiths," there has been a concerted movement from some circles to differentiate the God of Islam from the God of Christians and Jews. As Peter Reding, the Washington County group's communications director, so ignorantly put it: "The Muslims are not part of the Judeo-Christian tradition." Members of the group objected to "a Muslim praying to Allah rather than to God as Jews and Christians do," the article reported.
Reding and his fellow board members obviously have very little knowledge of Islam and its background, or else they would not resort to such closed-minded and inaccurate comments. If they would take a moment and look at their Christian brethren who also live in areas such as Bethlehem, Syria or Lebanon, they would see that these people often refer to God as "Allah." Although many would like to portray Allah as some mystical "moon god," that is completely inaccurate.
Just as Christians and Jews are the descendants of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob, Muslims are the descendants of Ishmael -- Ismail in Arabic. Muslims, in addition to Christians and Jews, believe in the story of Haggar and Ishmael being banished to a far-off land, which happened to be the Arab world. While the natural language of Abraham was Aramaic, Haggar brought Ishmael up among Arab tribes, and therefore he spoke their language. The Arabic word for the God of Abraham has and always will be "Allah..."
It is time to build bridges within the religious community, not put up roadblocks.
http://www.cair-net.org/default.asp?Page=articleView&id=33175&theType=NB
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