The above text, circulating via email since September 2003, was written by Rick Mathes, executive director of Mission Gate Prison Ministry in Chesterfield, Missouri. In subsequent statements on the ministry's Website, Mathes affirmed that the incident took place exactly as described.
However, a different version of events was reported in an article by Greg Kearney of the Lee News Service, in which a spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Corrections, which sponsored the training session, stated that the "imam" Mathes refers to above was a prison inmate and ordinary Muslim, not a trained cleric, and that although the inmate did answer various questions about his faith to the best of his ability, the issues of jihad and violence against non-believers were neither raised nor discussed during the exchange.
It is therefore a case of Mathes' word against the prison official's. I have not been able to find public statements by anyone else in a position to confirm the facts.
As to the substance of the alleged debate — whether or not it is a core tenet of Islam that believers must wage holy war against non-believers wherever they are found — there is fierce disagreement on that issue even among acknowledged experts in Muslim culture and theology, so I will not attempt to defend one side or the other in this brief commentary.
http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/rickmathes.html
Rick Mathes told BreakTheChain.org that he will not provide further details because, in his words, "I fear retribution - I have a 20 year prison ministry to protect."
Third-party accounts of the events in question paint a significantly different picture than the one offered by Mathes. Tim Kniest, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Corrections, told the Lee news service that the training session in question was for prison volunteers and took place in a corrections facility in Fulton, MO. However, according to Kniest, prison officials' recollection of events that day differ from Mathes' in several aspects:
Religious leaders representing faiths followed by current inmates were invited to present.
The presenter on Islam was not an Imam, but rather a Muslim inmate who was pressed into presenting after no Imam could be arranged.
Prison officials confirm that the Muslim inmate was asked a few questions that he was unable to answer, but none along the lines of those suggested by Mr. Mathes.
I have poked around Mathes's website a little. I clicked on the New Age article, for example, just for fun, and his definition of the term is clearly quite overly broad, apparently for his own purposes. From just a little examination of his site, Mathes's credibility is questionable.
Now, I'm not a New Ager and I'm not a Muslim, nor do I deny that SOME Muslims believe it's their religious duty to kill all others, but when one is as overly broad as Mathes, it discredits his entire cause.
Personally, I've seen this "shocking new revelation" come out on the Freerepublic more times than the NYT has 'discovered' Bush's National Guard record. Just the same, but it's good when someone like yourself goes to the trouble to respond so that the new guys can be let in on the joke.