Muslims in America today find themselves at the crossroads of many contentious issues — political, religious and cultural. So it is not surprising that controversies have again put Islam in the headlines, from a dispute over the show South Park to the cancellation of Franklin Graham’s appearance at a Pentagon prayer event.

This edition of ReligionLink provides a roundup of the controversies and links (below) to resources for covering them.

In the case of Franklin Graham, son of the famed evangelist Billy Graham, the decision by the U.S. military to drop him from a Pentagon event set for the National Day of Prayer on Thursday, May 6, was traced to the younger Graham’s sharp criticisms of Islam as a religion.

Read about the cancellation and Graham’s comments on Islam at The Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog and at the blog at Christianity Today.

The cancellation angered many conservative Christians in particular, such as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

The controversy also intruded on President Barack Obama’s meeting on Sunday, April 25, with the elder Graham at his retirement home in North Carolina. According to this Huffington Post story, Franklin Graham was also at the meeting between the president and his ailing, 91-year-old father and said he and Obama spoke briefly about the Pentagon issue. “I wanted to make him aware of that,” Franklin Graham said. “He said he would look into it.”

In another recent development, the creators of South Park, the satiric animated show on the Comedy Central cable channel, provoked an uproar when they included a sketch about the controversy over visually depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

While many, though not all, Muslims consider a visual depiction of the prophet blasphemous, Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom, edited and censored parts of the South Park episodes that could be considered inflammatory. In September 2005 a Danish newspaper published a dozen cartoons and caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked widespread violence by Muslims around the globe.

A small New York-based website called RevolutionMuslim.com put up a post objecting to the South Park episodes and indicating that the show’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, could be subject to attacks.

• Read a statement from Stone and Parker objecting to the censoring of the program.
• Read an April 22, 2010, Reuters story quoting a leader of RevolutionMuslim.com, Younus Abdullah Muhammad, defending the site.
• Read an April 22, 2010, post at Religion Dispatches by Hussein Rashid, a Muslim theologian and widely cited commentator, who objects that the RevolutionMuslim.com leaders do not understand or represent Islam.
• Read posts on the issue by Beliefnet’s Muslim blogger, Aziz Poonawalla, who agrees with Rashid.
• Read an April 25, 2010, essay on the controversy by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, titled “Not Even in South Park?”

Other developments

• On April 23, 2010, Lifeway Research released a survey showing that Protestant pastors in the U.S. have a negative view of Islam and more than half agree with Franklin Graham’s statement that Islam is an “evil” religion.
• Earlier in April, the liberal web watchdog Media Matters highlighted columns by Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association’s director of issue analysis for government and public policy, in which he advocated halting immigration of Muslims and repatriating them to Islamic countries. Fischer also said that Muslims who convert could “become not just good Christians but true Americans.”
• A survey from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, released Sept. 9, 2009, shows that Americans see Muslims as facing more discrimination than other major religious groups.

Resources

ReligionLink has many editions related to various aspects of Islam for those covering these stories. They include:

• Islam: a guide to U.S. experts and organizations — This ReligionLink guide includes more than 100 experts who specialize in such areas as civil rights, politics, foreign affairs, art, culture, history, law, family issues and more. It also includes Muslim advocacy organizations, research centers and think tanks.
• Covering Islam 101: The basics — Fifty-eight percent of Americans say they know little or nothing about Islam’s practices. And what they know is sometimes wrong. Meanwhile, 32 percent of Americans say the media are the biggest influence on their perception of Muslims. This edition of ReligionLink is a journalist’s guide to covering Muslims and Islam in America. It is a complement to a Religion Newswriters webinar presented on March 11, 2008.
• Understanding Islam: From Sunnis to Shiites and beyond — Muslims tend to avoid terms like denominations or sects to describe the different streams of tradition. All Muslims are one, they note, and share the same basic beliefs and rituals. But there are different schools of thought within Islam, denoted by historical and legal differences — differences that can lead to serious divisions.
• Covering Islam and Politics — Muslims’ engagement with government and politics is becoming more prominent in the United States and abroad on issues ranging from immigration and terrorism to charities and civil rights. This guide lists research centers, organizations and scholars with expertise on the growing role of Muslims’ interactions with government and politics.