What's in a name?

Back in 1986 I spent six weeks in Brazil leading a Rotary Group Study Exchange team. We were billeted by locals in the Amazon area adjacent to the vast rain forest. Before we left on our intrepid journey we were given some instruction in the language - Portuguese - by the honorary consul and we were emphatically told that the embroidered pockets on our team blazers must have Brazil spelt correctly, which as far as the Brazilians are concerned is Brasil. Apparently it infuriates them that the rest of the world spells it Brazil.

This will have come home to those of you who are watching the Fifa World Cup.

Brazil was discovered by the Portuguese and the sailors encountered a beautiful tree which had red-coloured wood which they named “Pau-brasil” which means brasil wood. The name came from the word “brasa” which translates as “hot coal, ember” in Portuguese.

Much of this wood was cut down and sent back to Portugal.

The reason we call it Brazil is because the Portuguese say the S more softly that we do. It’s not quite a Z, but almost. Hence when anyone heard the Portuguese talk about Brasil it sounded more like Brazil than Brasil.

End of history lesson.

Well not quite if you think going back to 1986 is history. Brazil, back then anyway, was a classic example of the gap that can occur between rich and poor. We were told that 95 per cent of the populous was poor and the majority of the wealth was in the hands of the remaining 5 per cent. We were billeted by Rotarians, most of who seemed to be in the top 5 per cent, but in some of the smaller centres we were living amongst the 95 per cent. The poor live in appalling hovels called favelas generally made of previously-used corrugated iron. It rained a lot up there; it was near the equator so it was incredibly hot, but it was overcast the whole time. Halley’s Comet was making one of its rare visits to Earth at the time, but there was no chance that we would ever see it.

I recall talking to an ex-pat Englishman who was a senior manager in a jute factory. We were having lunch with the staff in the company dining room and on the wall there was a large sign saying: “Brasil - the country of tomorrow.” This is Brasil’s national slogan: “The country of tomorrow.” The Englishman, who had lived in Brasil for 16 years, said he reckoned this slogan was holding them back. “Tomorrow never comes,” he said “And so the Brasilians continue to reluctantly accept their station in life.”

I asked a well-to-do lawyer I met how come the population didn’t revolt given the appalling gap in living standards. He said revolution is triggered by two conditions, hunger and cold. It certainly wasn’t cold and he said there were plenty of exotic tropical fruits in the jungle so no one went hungry.

The only city we visited which features in the Football World Cup was Manaus. Manaus had two claims to fame; it is home to a magnificent opera house and was known as the murder capital of the world. On a per head basis more people are murdered in Manaus than anywhere else on the planet. We were warned to stay alert as the Brasilians despised Americans - “Americanos Gringos” - and we looked like Americans. We came away unscathed, but I suppose we could have been murdered by the Phantom of the Opera.

And so we are stuck with the conundrum: is it Brasil or Brazil?

Well we managed the switch from Peking to Beijing without too much angst. Beijing apparently aligns more with the true Chinese way of pronouncing their capital city. I’ve often wondered if we shouldn’t anglicise some of our Maori place names to be more commensurate with the way we (mis)pronounce these. It would certainly be a great aid to our increasing numbers of overseas visitors.

We could have Wirewrapper, the Roomarhunger and the Whypoor rivers, Pieartooer, Fenooerpie and even Ayertayerrower.

Before the commencement of a rugby test the All Blacks could do the harker.

All of this provided the bulk of our Maury population agreed.

Mmm…I can just see my old mate Nelson Rangi crossing me off his Christmas card list; even as I write.

“The exact measure of the progress of civilisation is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.” – George Bancroft

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We sow, we reap and we agonise

"Teenage murderers on the rampage,” screamed the headline. Well it didn’t actually; I just made that up, but it is the sort of banner we might well have got used to over the last few months as more and more young people are severely sentenced for hideous homicides they have committed.

As I looked at the photos of the four people convicted for the senseless slaughter of the Featherston supermarket worker, I couldn’t help but think that a Hollywood movie director would have considered these three men and their lady accomplice were perfectly cast for their roles.

I hope I’m not getting too soft in my old age, but I’m starting to have a good deal of sympathy for our younger generation, many of whom are victims of a society we helped shape after decades of making all the wrong choices. 

They are being brought up in a vastly different world than I was.

It’s easy to say that we never really went along with the progressive policies and the liberal reforms that have insidiously crept into our way of life, and that we were cleverly persuaded that the changes were inevitable. In fact we were swept up in an unstoppable western world-wide movement, even though it was patently clear that many of our cherished traditions were being needlessly abandoned.

Marriage as an institution was thousands of years old, but in the latter part of the twentieth century modernists suddenly decreed that it was irrelevant. The feminist movement arguably led the way, and did so with some justification, but most of their leaders had the resources to cope. Lower down the socio-economic rung all it meant was an excuse for fathers to flee from the responsibilities that went with shared parenthood.

Abolishing censorship for an adult audience was ushered in despite warnings that a younger demographic would soon work out how to access pornographic images with roast busting consequences.

The potential rise of Colin Craig’s Conservative party with its focus on the restoration of the family unit may be an indication that the worm has turned, but if we really expect politicians to lead us back to the promised land we are likely to be sorely disappointed.

We haven’t been told of the backgrounds of Glen Jones’s brutal killers, but it is quite likely they had sordid childhoods which may well have included being brought up in single parent households, living on the edge of poverty. 

Research in Australia, Britain and America as well as New Zealand has revealed that fatherless children are worse off in terms of health, educational attainment, work ethics, income and lifetime wealth.

They are more prone to drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, illness, truancy, suicide, poverty and depression.

New Zealand has the developed world’s second highest percentage of single parent families and a UK report shows that compared with the intact married family, serious child abuse is 33 times higher when the mother lives with her boyfriend.

At the frontline of the result of this moral decline are our teachers, battling to control classes that contain stroppy undisciplined kids, many of whom have no respect at all for their elders. Typical response is to suspend the miscreants and leave them to roam the streets with idle hands. Thirty four per cent of teaching graduates apparently leave the profession within two years.

The statistics get worse. Apart from the decline in marriages and the rise in the divorce and separation rates the incidence of youth suicide in New Zealand is seven times higher than in 1968 and we perform about the same number of abortions as we import people through immigration channels to make up the numbers.

Of course the great majority of people overcome disadvantaged upbringings and many use the handicap as a springboard for achievement. And anyway, by and large most aspects of life have improved markedly over the last fifty years. There used to be a lot more hypocrisy around, even in the marriage vows, and much of what was wrong was never disclosed or was swept under the carpet.

But there must also be dissatisfaction that the trickle-down advantages of free market economics have never eventuated. Blatantly promoted desirable in-your-face products will constantly frustrate those who cannot partake because of the inequities in society.

Throwaway consumer items are a testament of our times and some of our young people will have been similarly discarded, leaving them with a feeling of total worthlessness.

Waiting in the wings is the drug culture, with a liberal element of society prepared to experiment with legalisation and once tightly-controlled alcohol products now readily accessible. In the end an institution that provides a warm bed, three meals a day and the security of a disciplined routine, may be appealing.

But it’s a murderous path to embark upon.

“We desperately need in this country to provide the inspiration and leadership to aspire to be a decent society…in the end our future as a nation will not and cannot and should not depend upon government structure, but rather on the resolve and character on each one of us as a citizen.” - Judge Mick Brown

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Reflecting on the longest day

Seventy years ago, on June the 6th 1944, the tide of the Second World War was about to turn. The allied invasion known as D-day started on the beaches of France and advanced all the way to Berlin where the Germans surrendered eleven months later. The war in Europe was over.

It was a clever and well planned campaign, but its success or otherwise was never a foregone conclusion. The Germans were aware that it was to happen, but wrongly assumed the enemy forces would land at Pas de Calais, which was just 45 km from the British coast. Rommel and his men encamped there and Allied bombers kept shelling the area as though preparing it for an invasion. False radar reports were issued to confirm this destination and dummy landing craft and rubber tanks were assembled to complete the illusion.

In the event the troops took the circuitous route to Normandy and landed at a beach the Americans would call Omaha. The weather was atrocious; convincing the German’s that the event would be postponed. Rommel even went back home to celebrate his wife’s birthday. 150,000 men landed on that June dawn, mostly American and British, but also Canadians, French, Polish and Dutch and although by the end of the day thousands would be dead, they succeeded in establishing a beachhead and the rest, as they say, is history.

The logistics needed to mount the invasion were monumental. Across the channel from the landing points England had been turned into a huge armed camp. 163 new airfields, 2 million tons of supplies, 1500 tanks and 5000 boats. The Luftwaffe’s 183 fighter planes that day faced 11,000 Allied aircraft.

D-day had been promised to Stalin as early as 1942. His country was under an interminable siege from Germany’s eastern front. By mid 1942 more than 150 German divisions had overrun the Soviet Union to a depth of 1500 km, and the casualties were horrendous. However President Roosevelt wisely decided that America and Britain were not ready in 1942 or even 1943. To placate Stalin he offered American lend-lease aid which eventually caused Stalin to fulminate that the war was being fought with American money and American machines, but with Russian lives.

There was more than a grain of truth in this claim. For every American who gave his life in World War II, some 59 Russians died. This is not to deny the American lives lost. Over 400,000 Americans perished, but Roosevelt’s shrewd delaying of the D-day assault meant the Allies won the war and America won the peace.

Americans then assumed the role of peacekeeper. They saw themselves as the ones who rode to the rescue, vanquished the enemy, got hailed as liberators, reinstated democracy as they envisaged it and then went home, certain they had left the place better than they had found it.

The vision is now fading and the well-intentioned Americans are confused. The memory of D-day has provided seventy years of inspiration, but the jubilant people of Paris have long since vanished; replaced by divided Koreans, victorious Viet-Cong, disillusioned Iraqis, dazed Afghanis and fuming Syrians. The US will have found that might, once expressed as “shock and awe”, is no match against ideology.

In the meantime on the home front the money has all gone, wiped out in an economy brought to its knees by a corrupt banking system that eventually morphed into the global financial crisis that is still unresolved. America’s ability to ride to the rescue is now constrained by cost overruns.

Their lame-duck president looks timid as he procrastinates over Iran, fails to act when the Syrian regime oversteps a red line that he himself had set and watches helplessly as the Ukraine stumbles from crisis to crisis. His military strategy relies on drones that indiscriminately assassinate all in their wake and as a result the democracy that once boasted a justice system that demanded a fair trial before retribution now seems irreparably compromised.

Even post-war America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, was far from perfect. They had few civil rights for a sizable segment of the population, they were about to usher in the despicable McCarthy era and their top law enforcement officer was found to have a surprising number of skeletons in his closet apparently alongside his own covert wardrobe of women’s clothing.

But they proceeded to fly us to the moon and made huge strides in the field of medical science and technology. After the war America’s enlightened Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and Franklin Roosevelt’s wily management of D-day meant Americans emerged as the saviours of humanity. They were given the mantle of international leadership and thus for a time became a repository for the invested wealth of the world.

History records however that it was the Russians who largely paid the price; perhaps they are now demanding their moment in the sun.

“More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars.” 
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

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Nothing to fear, but fear itself

She had a kindly voice on the phone; I judged her to be elderly and her tone was not the least bit acrimonious. But she was not happy with me. In my last column I referred to her favourite political party as the “nutty Greens.”

“I’m a Green supporter,” she said, “And I am definitely not nutty.”

I explained that it was a play-upon-words. Most Green supporters I assumed were vegetarians and therefore ate lots of nuts to counteract a lack of protein from an animal source. Hence, the nutty Greens. I told her in a past life I despised vegetarians. She understood my churlish attitude, but assured me she was carnivorous and though previously a National supporter, she had voted for Dr Russell Norman at the last election. I suggested this was unlikely; she was not in Dr Norman’s electorate; she had probably voted for Dr Sea Rotmann. On reflection, she agreed she had.

I then propounded a theory that it was no wonder Mr Hayes had garnered such a large majority given that the surnames of his two closest rivals were Ms Rotmann and Mr Bott.

She failed to see the funny side of this somewhat facetious comment.

“But why would you vote for the Greens?” I wanted to know, “Because,” she responded, “They care for the environment.”

“How is the environment going to look when it is filled with the putrid smoke from cannabis cigarettes once the Greens get their way?” I asked.

The question seemed to throw her. She was not aware that the Greens had a policy to decriminalise cannabis and argued with me that it was not so. I pointed her in the direction of the Green Party website, but she had neither a computer nor the skills to use one.

I said it seemed somewhat ironic that the Ministry of Health through its District Health Boards and many other health-conscious organisations are spending millions of dollars annually endeavouring to get people to give up smoking, even to the extent of potentially banning it altogether by the year 2025, while the Greens want to usher in a whole new coterie of addicts.

Research, I told her, has shown that cannabis is even more carcinogenic than tobacco.

I fear I might have added insult to injury in my next effort to curb her enthusiasm. The Greens, I proposed, probably got a 10% polling because 10% of New Zealander’s are potheads.

But you have to hand it to the Greens. They have been able to convince at least some sections of the electorate that the environment is in serious trouble and needs caring for.

In my view, just another one of H. L. Menken’s “endless series of imaginary hobgoblins.”

Writing in last week’s Wall Street Journal award-winning author and economist Matt Ridley said he is sick of hearing that we humans are “using up” the world resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the lands ability to support a greater population.

Ridley points out that we keep improving productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanisation, pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upwards.

Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over the past 50 years worldwide. Ausubel also came to the startling conclusion that even with the generous assumptions about population growth and growing affluence leading to a greater demand for meat and other luxuries we will need less farmland in 2050 than we needed in 2000 so long as we don’t grow more biofuels on land that could be growing food.

About ten years ago it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen agricultural yields would plummet and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: plough up the rain forests to grow food, or starve. But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed.

They will run out one day, but just as the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones we are sure to find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they expire.

Ridley reckoned human activities actually increase the production of green vegetation in natural ecosystems. Fertiliser taken up in crops is carried into forests and rivers by wild birds and animals, where it boosts yields of wild vegetation. In places like the Nile delta wild ecosystems are more productive than they would be without human intervention, despite the fact that much of the land is used for growing food.

I’m not sure my lady caller could be convinced to change tack. She did allow however that she had given her party vote to National at the last election.

It never fails to amaze me how people completely misunderstand the strategy around voting in an MMP environment.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H. L. Mencken

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The Mad Hatters tea party

It’s called the House of Representatives and indeed it is. It represents the best and worst in us and our irrational MMP style of governance has exacerbated that.

Recent events have emphasised the point.

Maurice Williamson kicked it all off. Once the darling of the liberals after a homo-erotic speech supporting same-sex marriage he let his new-found friends down by interfering with the justice system in a phone call to the police attempting to get a substantial National Party donor, who had been charged with alleged domestic violence, off the hook.

Winston Peters then promised to have the beleaguered Judith Collins sacked by her boss for not fully disclosing that the Chinese government had paid for some segments of her recent trip to the People’s Republic. “Gone by the end of the week,” he boasted. Sweating profusely, shaking like a leaf and slurring his words, his so-called “smoking gun” failed to fire.

Brendon Horan, once a favoured member of the NZ First stable, weighed in next claiming Mr Peters couldn’t talk – or even slur presumably – as he had failed to disclose that he part-owned a racehorse. Given the nags record on the track Winston was probably ashamed to admit even a part-ownership.

Horan was no doubt still licking his wounds after a sibling accused him of dipping into their mother’s estate causing Winston to dismiss him from the party with an even greater velocity than he had hoped John Key would do to Ms Collins.

An enquiry eventually cleared Mr Horan of any wrongdoing, but he still languishes almost unnoticed in one of parliament’s darkest recesses as an independent MP and is probably going to have to seek employment elsewhere come September.

However the first prize for the most disturbing behaviour of the week has to go to Jan Logie. If you’ve never heard of Jan Logie, then join the club. Jan is a Green list MP - all Green MP’s are list - and last week she totally ignored item 6 on the Green’s so-called “List of values” which states “Engage respectfully without personal attacks” when she tweeted: “John Key says Bill English has produced as many budgets as children….Begs the question who has he F&%d to produce it.”

Charming.

And so that’s a small sampling of our House of Representatives. The nutty Greens, the race-based Maori party, Labour with its gaggle of gays, United-Future and its bow-tied beau’s, the grey-underpowered NZ First, the conspirational Conservatives, the philosophically-inept Act, mana-less Mana, the rapacious Nationalists and potentially, heaven forbid, Herr Dotcom’s National Socialist leaning, Mein Kampf loving, Internet party.

The Ukraine is looking more stable by the day.

************************************



The Budget failed to address one of the major problems facing New Zealand and that is the widening gap between rich and poor. Last week two chief executives, one from the BNZ and the other from the Warehouse, admitted their multi-million-dollar remuneration packages were obscene and claimed they were embarrassed to receive such recompense.

I noticed neither offered to take a pay cut, but both conceded that those down at the coal face deserve a bigger slice of the pie.

This is not just a New Zealand phenomenon and is causing concern worldwide.

Last weeks’ Time magazine blamed globalisation which it said had created an international labour market that had heightened competition for jobs and had shifted power to employers. Add to this the fact that incestuous corporate governance tends to lavish largesse on managers over workers and there is an urgent need to reverse this alarming trend.

Those whose politics align to the right-of-centre are committed to the idea that wealth created at the top trickles down to everybody, even though a growing mountain of evidence tells us that this simply doesn’t work in the real world.

On the other side of the spectrum too many people believe that the capitalist coupling of free-trade agreements and deregulation works against the wage earner. Imported goods like clothing, footwear and appliances have never been cheaper, but internal costs like property taxes and electricity rise exponentially. The answer to the problem lies somewhere in the middle. Ideally governments need to promote business-friendly policies that allow growth while at the same time taking steps to ensure the benefits of that growth are spread more widely and equitably.

Higher wages would negate the need for the complicated working-for-families tax package that Labour introduced and National has maintained.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for a solution. There are more important things to attend to - like scoring points in the House of Representatives.

Some people use their brains to think,
Some use them to make art,
Some politicians use their brains,
To keep their ears apart.
- John Ansell

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Kids, please don't do as I do

When the Palmerston North Squash Cub held a weekend tournament with a fancy dress cabaret in their clubrooms on the Saturday evening, the good-natured Masterton Police lent me two uniforms.

A story I recounted in a column a few weeks ago.

I have to point out ‘uniforms’ is a bit of an exaggeration; all we needed on a cold winters night were two great-coats and two helmets. We could supply the dark navy pants and substantial black shoes to complete the illusion.

My partner in crime was John Booth. Older residents who want to put a face to a name would be helped by knowing John’s father was well known stock agent Randal Booth and his mother was Sister Booth, for many years the matron at Glenwood Hospital. John had joined the navy and seen the world after leaving school, but back in the early 1960s, when this tale unfolded, he was managing the Masterton Metal Company at Waingawa.

Back in those halcyon 6 o’clock closing days, although serving alcohol after hours at sporting clubs was illegal police mostly turned a blind eye to this indiscretion. From time to time however they would raid a suspicious premise to maintain some semblance of law.

We drove over on the cold wet night in my Volkswagen with our two girlfriends who later showed exceptional taste by marrying us, and when we got to the club we sent them on ahead to mingle with the party goers. The club lounge was upstairs and we wanted to carefully time our arrival to give full effect to the pandemonium we were hoping to create.

Finally we braced ourselves, ran up the stairs and burst through the doors, notebooks in hand. People recoiled at the sight of us. Glasses were hastily hidden in a variety of places and many imbibers fled into the toilets which now became unisex, and were soon full to over-flowing. Some had glass-shaped bulges in the most unlikely parts of their persons. John started to take down the particulars of those nearest the door while I marched up to the bar, slapped my notebook on the counter and said authoritatively to the ashen-faced barman: “I want names!”

To be fair, and to avoid exaggeration this all happened in less than a minute or two before a Masterton club member recognised John Booth and knocked his helmet off. When mine was forcibly removed the cry went up, “It’s Long and Booth,” and after much relief-based hilarity, the party was back in full swing.

There was a prize for best fancy dress, which we won, and the evenings revelry might have ended there save for a conversation around the bar with a couple of Dicks that revealed a new opportunity. I use the word Dick in its true sense. These coincidentally were the Christian names of the two men who feature in this story.

To protect the innocent I can reveal that one Dick was the manager of Masterton’s largest insurance company and the other was the professionally qualified registrar of Masterton’s largest institution.

These two thoughtfully considered that rather than waste the uniforms we might go in to the city centre and have some real fun. They were both competitive squash players and had not brought fancy dress over as such, but had for the occasion dressed up as a couple of larrikins. They had blackened their faces with burnt corks and wore dishevelled clothing, the complete antithesis of the type of dress they wore, commensurate with the positions they held back in Masterton.

We agreed to motor on down to Broadway where the two Dicks would create a disturbance and John and I would arrest them; a fairly simple procedure. Marion and Judy accompanied us in the Volkswagen; the two Dicks travelled in Dick Insurance’s car. It was pouring with rain, but true to the era Broadway was a busy place thanks to the Saturday night picture-goers who were all just exiting the cinemas. Broadway had two theatres quite close to each other, the State and the Regent, which shows you how much imagination the people who chose the names for New Zealand’s picture-houses had back then.

We parked the Veedub about midway between the two theatres; Dick’s car was a few spaces down. John and I walked up the street nodding to the general public with our hands clasped behind our backs and ensuring that the doors of the retail premises were locked and secure. Archetypal police behaviour back then before gendarmerie on the beat became a rare sight.

Behind us the two Dicks started an altercation and we rushed back and attempted to break them up.

Onlookers did not realise it was play-acting. In fact the performance of the two Dicks would have rivalled anything the moviegoers had seen on the screen that night. They rolled over and over on the footpath as John and I tried desperately to prise them apart. They ended up in the gutter which was streaming with rain water. The illusion was complete. We ‘policemen’ tried to elicit assistance from the onlookers who were now literally in their hundreds, lining both sides of the footpath. We got no help. Even back in those relatively law-abiding times, the larrikins were the heroes and were being egged on by the baying crowd.

Dick Insurance decided to take off and I followed in hot pursuit, while my colleague struggled with Dick Institution. I yelled to the crowd: “Stop that man!” but they parted like the Red Sea to ensure him a safe passage and actually jeered at me! One lady did try to help. She attempted to trip Dick Insurance up with the hook end of her umbrella and very nearly succeeded, but he only half fell and then regained his balance.

Finally the last man to leave the confines of the Regent - he must have been sitting in the front row - came to my aid. He was well built, probably in his seventies and possibly even a world war one veteran, who said: “I’ll get him officer” and dive tackled Dick Insurance, spreading him all over the footpath. I got him, now half stunned, in a full-nelson and dragged him back to John who was struggling to get his charge into the waiting Volkswagen. By now the crowd was cheering, not the two successful policemen, but the two larrikins, who had put up such a good fight.

All this was witnessed by Marion and Judy who had to stay on the footpath while we drove the arrestees around the corner where we hid in the backyard of a closed service station until the crowd had dispersed. When we went back for Dick’s car and to pick up our potential fiancées they told us we had fled the scene at an opportune time. As we had pulled away the real police arrived in real police cars, apparently alerted by a member of the public who would have told them that two of their colleagues were in all sorts of trouble on Broadway. Reports of the arrest, and of their fellow policemen leaving the scene in a lime green Volkswagen, must have seemed surreal.

Marion just happened to work at Dick Institution’s institution. He didn’t want to hear a word of this back at work on Monday, he cautioned her, given that discipline was an essential ingredient in the smooth running of the organisation.


As far as I know, no other nurse was ever told.

“Son, when you participate in sporting events, its not whether you win or lose, it’s how drunk you get.” - Homer Simpson.

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Endeavouring to understand Islam

Last week I listened to an address by a noted authority on Islam. He told us that this religion was growing at such a pace world-wide that in 25 years Muslims will outnumber Christians.

I’m not sure if I’ll still be here in 25 years, but I’m working on it.

The Western view of Islam has been understandably distorted by the 9/11 attack on America and reports of terrorism and suicide bombings we read about or see graphic images of most days on our television sets.

On the other side of the coin Muslims claim that Westerners are immoral, materialistic and flaunt their sexuality. They also believe we seek to undermine the political stability of the Middle East in favour of Israel.

Radicals and jihadists aside, no doubt the vast majority of the followers of Muhammad are peace-loving people and I decided to delve into the religion itself given that in time it may overwhelm us.

I could find very little reliable information about the Prophet Muhammad’s birth and formative years as a Meccan youth. The earliest accounts of his life were written at least 150 years after his death. He was born in A.D. 570 into the Hashim family of the powerful tribe of Quraysh in Mecca, a great city of commerce in the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammad’s father, Abdullah, passed away before his son’s birth and his mother Amina died when he was only six years old.

Muhammad became a wealthy trader, making caravan trading trips that took him into contact with Jews and Christians. He became interested in spending uninterrupted meditation on religious matters and during these periods he claims he heard the voice of Allah or the Archangel Gabriel who gave him messages to preach to mankind. During the following years Muhammad developed a strong regional following and his armies gradually took control of the whole of Arabia. Muhammad died in A.D. 632 at the age of sixty-two and was succeeded by Abu Bakr, one of his earliest followers.

The Qur’an is the Islamic equivalent of the Bible. It contains about the same amount of content as the New Testament. The Qur’an is divided into 114 “Surah’s” or sections. According to tradition, different parts of the Qur’an were revealed to Muhammad verbatim by the angel Gabriel over a period of 23 years.

Islam teaches that the true god is the Muslim deity, Allah. All other views of God are false. The Qur’an records: “The true religion with God is Islam.” The Qur’an also stresses that Allah is one person only: “They are unbelievers who say God is the third of three.”

Muslims mistakenly believe that Christians believe in three Gods. This idea is a clear misrepresentation of Christian belief. Christians are not polytheists, who accept three Gods, but monotheists who believe in one God.

Jesus, referred to as “Isa” in Arabic, appears in the Qur’an in a total of 93 verses scattered among fifteen Surah’s. Although the Qur’an concedes He was born of a virgin the Islamic holy book says He is not the son of God. Surah 10:68-69 states: They say: “God (Allah) has begotten a son! Glory be to Him! He is self-sufficient! His are all things in the heavens and on earth!” No warrant have you for this! Do you say about Allah what you do not know? Say: Those who say a lie against Allah will never prosper.

Muslims must adhere to a number of disciplines.

They must bow towards Mecca and say their prayers 5 times a day. This is set by tradition and is not in the Qur’an. The preferred location is in a Mosque. There are prescribed ablutions that involve washing hands, mouth, face, nostrils, arms and feet up to the ankles.

Followers are expected to give money to community welfare programmes to promote Islam. The common guideline is 2.5% of earnings.

Islamists must fast for one month each year. This is the ninth month in the Muslim lunar calendar known as Ramadan. Fasting means abstaining from all food, drink and sexual relationships during sunrise to sunset.

Every Muslim is expected to visit Mecca at least once in their lives if they are physically and financially able.

Perhaps Islam’s Achilles’ heel is that it has two opposing and often-times deadly factions.

The Shi’ites are known as “The Party of Ali” because they broke away from the main body of Muslims in the 7th century. They insisted that Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, should have become leader after the Prophets death. They number about 10% of Muslims and are mainly in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and India.

The second group are the Sunnis. The word Sunni refers to the customary practice of the Prophet. This community includes a variety of theological attitudes and outlooks. They comprise about 90% of Muslims.

You can’t help but wonder if there might be a collision course in the offing. The Shi’ite-Sunni divide is not unlike the once bloody division between Catholic and Protestant, now thankfully in the distant past, but if the two Islamic factions can find peace amongst themselves Christians may feel threatened.


Perhaps I’ll set aside that desire to live for at least another 25 years.

“I do benefits for all religions. I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality” - Bob Hope

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