Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati

Recently, I rented disc 1 of season 1 of the show ”30 Days,” and in the episode where a Christian went to live with Muslims, I heard a tid-bit of information I’d never heard before—that the Virgin Mother is always depicted wearing a hijab!  This has been percolating in my consciousness for several days, so I thought I’d list some resources here.

Catholic nuns, too, wear a form of hijab.  But for some reason, I have never heard of people talking so arrogantly about how nuns are dressed.  And I’ve never heard anyone criticize how the mother of Christ was dressed.  But for some reason, many American Christians view the hijab with scorn, which is probably a result of their minds being manipulated by anti-Islamic cultural biases.

Here is an article on the issue of Mary’s hijab.

In my opinion, the most pervasive example of this cultural bias is our refusal to translate the Arabic word “Allah” into “God,” its English equivalent.  As a result, so many people think that Muslims worship “some other God,” when really they worship the same God as the Christians and the Jews—Yahweh.  It is widely understood that Jews worship the same “God” as Christians, so why not extend this understanding to Muslims?

This would be like fearing Mexicans because they worship “El Dio.” Or even more absurdly, this would be like a Christian fearing that someone who worships “Yeshua” would be destined to hell, or something.

Here is an interesting experiment.  Go to Google Translate.  Type in the word “الله,” and select “Arabic to English.” (Just copy and paste the Arabic text from this page.) I got that text from this article, which claims it is the Arabic spelling for “Allah.” And guess how Google translates it?  “God”!

What’s so difficult about the concept.

To recap:  the mother of Christ wore a hijab, and instead of worrying about “Allah,” we should start freaking out about all the Mexicans worshipping El Dio.

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