Last week I visited the 96th Street Mosque with a group of five NYU students. The Imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, a charming, soft-spoken man, received us in his office.
When asked to say a few words about Islam, he took a good look at his audience and smartly asked us to introduce ourselves and to state our origin. Among the six of us present, there were no Arabs. The Imam proceeded in addressing
the “scientific” side of Islam. “The dead visit us,” he said. And because we vibrate at lower resonances than the dead, we cannot see them. They, however, can.
He went on to point out how lucky we are that Allah put all that information in the Koran with no explanation. “It is too much thought for our brain to process,” he explained. Allah gave us the information, so “we wouldn’t need to think,” the Imam explained.
That same week, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich announced that by the end of his hypothetical second term as president, there would be a colony on the moon with colonists able to petition for statehood – so long as the colony had a population of at least13,000. He was immediately accused by Mitt Romney to be out of touch with the American people. That same evening Romney prayed, as he does every evening, to a God who lives on Planet Kolob.
Do you see where I am leading you?
There are almost a million nominal Muslims in New York, out of which roughly fifty 
percent are regular observers. Newt Gingrich has a significant following and Mitt Romney could be our next President.
The reading of the Abrahamic texts (the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah) requires a master of languages, theology, and philosophy who can unlock meaning from the texts. The reader hence, unable to think for himself, becomes a disciple. When Lorenzo Valla declared in the fifteenth century that the Bible had to be made more accessible, Erasmus took on the task to translate it, and so did Luther, then Calvin. The texts became accessible to the people in their language, thereby limiting third party 
interpretation.
Serious debates started soon after the Bible was “vulgarized,” such as the example of a countryside priest who goes to church on a bicycle with consecrated hosts. The priest falls, the hosts spread on the grass and a mouse eats a host. Is the body of Christ in the body of the mouse? As debates grew, and birth of religious criticism, so the decline of the Church began.
In Dr. Nawal El Saadaws funny, fast-paced play, God Resigns from the Summit, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed reflect on the current state of affairs of their people and question God’s design. They conclude they need to meet God face-to-face to confront the desolate situation their people are faced with. No more blind faith. They want facts. I leave you to read this fantastic play to discover what happens when God accepts to meet with his Prophets.
Is rational thought process necessarily divorced from faith? This is a never-ending debate. But how about faith in politics? There are over one million Muslims in France out of which five hundred thousand attend religious services. Four and a half percent of Catholics attend mass on Sundays according to a 2009 survey from the Journal La Croix. We are bound to see one of them take a bid for the presidency, aren’t we? Does it matter? A few years ago, French Minister Christine Boutin was under fire, accused of letting her Christian beliefs influence her political decisions. It mattered then.
By Alfredo Jimeno Orrego
