A Cultural Chasm

J. Michael Sharman

            About 6:30 a.m. on the morning after Thanksgiving Day, I turned on the radio and it was playing a Christmas carol. When I got home from work later that afternoon, I found that my wife and four of the grandkids had totally transformed our home into one big Christmas display.

Our daughter worked that “Black Friday” evening at her part-time Christmas season job in the mall, and her bi-vocational pastor husband shipped out an acre of poinsettias from the greenhouse he works at while planning in his mind the sermons he would deliver during the Christmas season. My younger son called to tell us how he and his wife spent Thanksgiving with her family, and I left messages on my older son’s cell and home phones apologizing for not having a longer time to talk when he had called Wednesday night before his own holiday busy-ness began.

            Traditionally, that’s the way we spend this time of year. It’s our culture, our faith, our way of life. Our children and our grandchildren grow up in it with our family, and they are surrounded by it in our culture. That’s how we live.

            On that same day, on the other side of the globe, a very different interplay of family, faith and tradition was being reported.

            Two sisters and a companion went to the all boys school where their uncle, Youssef al-Hayali, worked as a school guard in the Diyala province northwest of Baghdad. The sisters and their companion are each believers in radical Islam and are al Qaeda militants. Gathering together their uncle’s family, they beheaded him and his wife while forcing the couple’s children to watch their parents’ executions.

            Village police chief Captain Ahmed Khalifa said that the three al Qaeda executioners did not try to hide their crime or craft up an alibi, rather they admitted to the police that they had killed Mr. and Mrs. al-Hayali because he was an infidel. They knew he was an infidel, they said, because he did not pray and he wore western-style trousers.[1]

            While my own family had a week of Thanksgiving celebrations and Christmas preparation, over in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia a husband was trying to get the international press to report his outrage that the Saudi Arabian General Court had sentenced his wife, who had been kidnapped from a shopping mall and gang-raped by seven men, to receive 200 lashes and six months in jail. She had violated Saudi law at the time of her kidnapping by being at the mall without an appropriate male escort.[2]

The rape victim had originally been sentenced to 90 lashes, but the Saudi higher court increased the sentence when she appealed her conviction. The Saudi Justice Ministry said the ruling was legal and followed the “the book of God and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad.”[3]

Twelve to eighteen percent of Moslems in Islamic countries are estimated to accept the teachings and dictates of al Queda.[4] Since there are an estimated 1.3 to 1.5 billion Moslems[5], this means that there are roughly 156 million to 270 million people scattered around the globe who embrace al Queda’s deadly way of life.

As my family and yours are simply trying to enjoy our peaceful, prosperous American lives and to stumble our way to following Jesus’ Golden Rule of treating each person as we would want to be treated, there are hundreds of millions of other families who are passionately pursuing al Queda’s mandate that all Americans, Christians, Israelis, Jews, and Moslems who do not believe as al Queda believes, should die.

             The al Queda faith in Islam that mandates a school guard and his wife should be beheaded because of his trouser selection.

The Wahhabi sect of Islam that rules a nation whose highest court sentences a young bride to be whipped and thrown into prison because she went to the mall without a male relative.

            I cannot understand or begin to fathom the basis for the cultural chasm that exists between that part of the world and mine. But understand it or not, my family and yours will soon have to decide what our response will be when our cultures, our faiths, and our ways of life collide. We no longer left with the choice to do nothing.

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By J. Michael Sharman Click here for bio and archived articles