Posted on 12/01/2007 5:59:31 PM PST by DogByte6RER
'We can't joke about the Prophet Mohammed'
By Blake Evans-Pritchard in Khartoum
Last Updated: 12:04am GMT 02/12/2007
You could have cut the air in the classroom with a knife. The students in front of me had frozen, their mouths open. Then one of my favourite students - a lovely, charming girl with a great sense of humour - said in a low, warning voice: “Teacher, we can’t joke about the Prophet Mohammed.”
I'd stay in Sudan if I could, says teddy teacher -
And at that moment I realised just how easy it would be to cross the boundaries of cultural acceptability in this sensitive country. We had been playing the simple parlour game, Consequences, in which a piece of paper is passed around the room, with everyone writing a different name, location or action in order to build up a simple story. The story would then be read out to the class.
Now there it was in black and white on the piece of paper in front of me, my get into jail card. The children had followed my instructions to the letter, but the consequence for me could have been disaster.
“The Prophet Mohammed met Rebecca Nyandang at a cinema,” it read. “She said to him: 'Hello’. He said to her: 'I want to buy a motorbike.’ And the consequence was: 'They never saw each other again’.”
The young man reading it out had got as far as Mohammed when the little girl stepped in and saved me. What was written on the rest of the sheet of paper remained my guilty secret.
Freshly arrived in Sudan, and pretty new to teaching, I couldn’t hide my acute embarrassment. But just as Gillian Gibbons found out this week, it does not have to be your fault. It was not me who wrote “Prophet Mohammed” on the piece of paper, just as it was not Gillian who named the teddy bear Mohammed.
As an English teacher in Khartoum, you have to be so careful and it is difficult not to reflect on the fate of Gillian and to think: “That could have been me.”
As my experience demonstrated, even those of us who have taken the time and effort to make sure we are well versed in the sensitivities of the Islamic faith can be caught out. I had thrown clothes out of my suitcase to make space in my suitcase for my extensive library of books about Islam and lugged it all the way from London, but that would not have saved me.
Like Gillian, I had simply been naïve in assuming that we could transpose a western concept into an alien culture without causing offence to their religion.
And I was not alone. Colleagues I chatted to this week agreed that the whole affair has more to do with Sudan than it does with Islam. “I have a lot of friends who are Muslim, and I did understand the Islamic culture before coming here, but I was not prepared for this,” one woman teacher told me.
She thought many Sudanese just have no idea about the rest of the world. “They tell you what to do, and they don’t listen to the views of anyone else,” she said.
For me, the past few days have really driven home that just having a general appreciation of Islam is not always enough to avoid causing offence.
Blake Evans Pritchard is a teacher in Khartoum.
I know, I was making a joke saying the Koran is the zero.
As in, it has zero value, zero truth, zero reason to be read and taken seriously...
Yep, Hindus came up with that, and the Muslims came up with zip.
Crap, I’d rather see naked photos of Mrs. Clinton than that rag.
Many Atheists and Islamics feel that a free society is expendable and unnecessary.
ping
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