Muhammad Bears

Does anybody know whether the Chicago Bears have any of those free #87 jerseys left?

Now hold on, fellow Cowboys fans, and let me explain. The jersey offer to which I am referring showed up last month alongside the story on a media website about the Bears' 38-20 victory over the New York Giants. Recent events have drawn me back into that story a little, for reasons other than the help the win gave the Cowboys in their pursuit of a now safely locked up division title.

It is now worth pondering who got a lot of praise, high praise in fact, for the Bears' win that day. Number 87 on the squad is a twice-elected Pro-Bowler who caught seven passes against the Giants, for over 100 yards and a touchdown. His name is Muhain Muhammad. Replicas of his jersey that were offered for free carried on their fronts the number 87 and just the name "Muhammad." Just that name. On a football jersey.

About the time that all this was coming out of Chicago, a British teacher, Gillian Gibbons, who was teaching seven-year-olds in Khartoum, Sudan, had thrust upon her another playful use of the name Muhammad, this time in connection with a teddy bear brought to class by one of her students. Class members, apparently under the influence of the popularity of a schoolmate who bore the name, wanted to call the bear Muhammad, too. Ms. Gibbons went along with their choice, and then found out, too late, that this would become a big no-no in at least certain quarters of Muslim society. There, you can sire a thoroughly rotten son and still call him Muhammad, but you cannot make invidious comparisons between the Prophet and any of the other animals in the world, even pretend ones.

Ms. Gibbons barely escaped a brutal lashing and an extended imprisonment in Sudan for what was deemed her crime of "inciting religious hatred." The Sudanese Foreign Ministry referred to Ms. Gibbon's act as misconduct against the Islamic faith. (Say what?) Sudanese clerics condemned it as part of a Western plot against Islam in general. (Say what, what?) Even the Muslim Council of Britain, otherwise very positively disposed to Ms. Gibbons, would come to call her classroom action a "mistake." (Aw, come on now.)

We can only hope that while Ms. Gibbons is enjoying a much deserved rest back in England, there is at least one Sudanese seven-year-old who can still cuddle her teddy bear with the wrong name and not worry about somehow putting a rip in the fabric of the cosmos for doing so. But we can be sure that there is one sweaty football player still being allowed to enjoy his highly praised name's being run through washing machines all over Chicago Beardom by those fortunate enough to be able to wear their own #87 jerseys without impunity. And that there will be other bearers of the name Muhammad, bad as well as good, all over the world for all the time to come.

The more I read about The Prophet of Islam, the easier it is for me to like him, and to get really ticked off at so many of his followers who fail to appreciate the sublime quality of his humanness, and who substitute their own humorlessness, ill-temperedness, and viciousness for it. The child-loving Muhammad I have come to know would have immediately gotten beyond whatever negativities his culture attached to real live bears, and cherished any child's treasuring her pretend bear's bearing his name. Just as the business-savvy Muhammad would have appreciated both the commercial and the human value of rewarding one of his real-life name-bearers with a little more than the normal fifteen-minute allotment of worldly fame.

I wonder what has happened to the Christian presence at Ms. Gibbon's school in Khartoum. It was originally founded by Christians groups, but now has an enrollment that is 90% Muslim. And that is fine. But what isn't fine is the continuing attacks on Christians by Muslim extremists for speaking of Jesus and God in the same breath, in contrast to the "purer" faith of Islam that extols the humanity and not the divinity of its own Prophet. It makes no sense to honor Muhammad's humanity and then permit no physical representations of him, ostensibly because his perfection is that of the unrepresentable Allah Himself. And while we are on this subject, I have a really big problem with protecting The Prophet from being pulled into the world of physical representations, while affixing his very name to as many Muslim offspring as a family unit will permit.

Where better place to have aired out issues like this than at Unity High, Khartoum, rather than in a courtroom presided over by a besieged, even if wise, judge? In our dreams, perhaps.