c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As Muslims from London to Islamabad take to the streets to defend their lampooned prophet, the frustrated feelings on display are ringing familiar beyond the world of Islam.

Pagans, Hindus, Native Americans and others convinced the mass media have long vilified their religions are taking pens, microphones and cameras into their own hands. They’re retelling stories of their religions in textbooks, news interviews and on the Internet in fresh bids to be understood and remembered for the positive qualities often cited by insiders.

By doing so, believers often insist they’re taking their rightful place as educators of those who know little about religion beyond their own experience. But whether the faithful should have the final say in publicly defining themselves is a matter of spirited debate.

One battleground: the State Board of Education in California. There, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) has hired a law firm to demand revisions to a manuscript for a forthcoming sixth-grade textbook. The group says critics have had undue influence in unfairly suggesting Hinduism sanctions polytheism, sexism and “the social evil of caste discrimination” in India.

“For many years, Hinduism was taught from a non-Hindu perspective,” said Mehir Meghani, M.D., president of HAF. “But Hindu Americans will simply no longer tolerate Hinduism being depicted as nothing more than caste and cows and continue to suffer the physical and psychological abuse these stereotypes perpetuate.”

Scholars, however, are joining cartoonists in arguing that outsiders sometimes make keen observations that those inside a religion are prone to miss _ or keep inside the fold. Harvard University Sanskrit scholar Michael Witzel, for instance, denounced the HAF suggestions as a Hindu “whitewash” of history and helped draft a version under consideration by the California board.

“We cannot allow right-wing groups to rewrite textbooks according to political games being played in India,” Witzel said. “If we had not intervened, all the Hindu edits would have gone through, and the textbook would have been abominable.”

Other faiths are getting creative to stage their platforms:

_ High-profile Pagan “pride days” have become annual events, not only in San Francisco and New York, but in central Arkansas and Gambier, Ohio.

_ Practitioners of Santeria, a nature-based religion with an Afro-Cuban history, have launched a Web site explaining that “Santeria” is a misnomer for Yoruba religion and offering “first-hand knowledge about this often misunderstood religion.”

_ Muslims have garnered worldwide attention this year by attracting thousands, angered by Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, to rallies in Africa, Europe and Asia.

To let cartoonists have the last word with their satire would have left the public with a misleading image of Islam, courtesy of an uninformed source, said Imam Talal Eid, director of religious affairs for the Islamic Institute of Boston.

In speaking out, “We didn’t leave it up to one person. The cartoonist was one person. The publisher was one person,” Eid said. “What do you want me to say? It’s a cartoon? It’s freedom of expression? No. … Freedom of expression should be used with responsibility.”

Watching Muslim protests unfold, Mahtowin Munro says she can relate to the outrage that comes with feeling denigrated. A Native American, she recalls growing up in the 1960s and being told “we worshipped trees and rocks and we were `simple people’ because we didn’t understand the concept of one God.”

For her, these Danish cartoons triggered memories.

“I think of all the images of Native people who have been in not only cartoons, but also books and movies,” said Munro, co-leader of United American Indians of New England. “They would show us as cannibals or savages or make fun of us. (Since then), we’ve tried to emphasize that we want to speak for ourselves, and we won’t tolerate that racist or insensitive stuff that’s put out.”

Opus Dei, a lay Catholic group featured in the upcoming “The Da Vinci Code” film, is trying to see a silver lining in the upcoming movie featuring an assassin named Silas, an albino Opus Dei monk. One week in mid-February, the group received calls from CNN, ABC, PBS and other major networks. Each interview provides an opportunity to convey “the real Opus Dei,” with emphasis on its humanitarian missionaries in Africa, according to spokesperson Brian Finnerty.

The organization has been offering the media interviews with a person they call a “real” Silas with Opus Dei, Silas Agbim, a Nigerian-born stockbroker working in New York City who epitomizes the group’s mission of Catholics finding “Christ in their work, family life and other ordinary activities.”

In other words, Opus Dei has been working hard to define itself so the public doesn’t rely solely on a work of fiction.

“The novel and the movie have given us a much bigger platform to present ourselves to the public,” Finnerty says. “In a certain sense, the movie has opened all doors for us.”

Depicting one religion or another in a sinister light has been a modus operandi in Hollywood for decades, according to Jack Shaheen, author of “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People” (Interlink, 2001). His examples include:

_ Drum-beating Native Americans playing villains in cowboy-and-Indian films of the early 20th century.

_ A mystery-cloaked Roman Catholicism helping render Italians untrustworthy in films of the 1930s.

_ Sinister Arabs representing evil on the silver screen in “Back to the Future,” “Jewel of the Nile,” “Delta Force” and Disney’s “Aladdin.”

Islam and Arabs are Hollywood’s current “whipping boys,” depicted with stereotypes after motifs have proven culturally antiquated for other groups.

“Arab Muslims need to be part of the creative process, and they just aren’t,” said Shaheen, a professor emeritus of mass communications at Southern Illinois University. “When (a vilified religious group) becomes part of the process, it becomes different _ not necessarily positive, but balanced.”

In literature, Shaheen sees Muslims coming to define their religion for the broader public through the novels of Diana Abu Jaber and the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye.

Such creative projects from believers are welcome contributions to the quest to understand how religion works, according to Barbara DeConcini, executive director of the American Academy of Religion, an association of religion scholars. But she wants to make sure those outside the fold don’t get pushed out of public discussion forums.

Living with colonialism’s legacies, she said, “there’s a way in which we have earned the suspicion of religious practitioners of traditions other than the Western traditions, and we have to acknowledge that.”

But, she added, believers should want to share the interpreters’ stage.

“We don’t say … only motorcycle gangs can speak about what it means to be a member of such a gang.” Similarly, she said, “Religion is a social phenomenon. … It exists in the world and is studied by scholars the way everything else in the world is.”

MO/PH END RNS

Editors: To obtain a photo of actor Tom Hanks in “The Da Vinci Code,” to be released in May, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.