Who's afraid of Islam - RTÉ

HelterSkelter

What did you all think of this mini-series on RTÉ? I only caught the third (final) episode last night but I found it very interesting and informative. I was disappointed it didn't focus more on Muslims living in Ireland though (although maybe that was covered in the first two episodes). Do you think it was a fair reflection of ordinary Muslims?

larryone

I only saw the first episode, I also found it very inteesting. It's a very important thing to educate people and help them to understand more and fear less.
I'll see if I can get torrents of it when I get home.

HelterSkelter

What's the story with religion classes in school nowadays? Do they teach kids about various different religions? Or is it all just learning about Catholism like when I was in school?

larryone

It's been 6 years since I was in school, and the religion classes then were a bit of a pharse. Mostly involved watching videos. sometimes watching movies. sometimes watching the simpsons. Our religion teacher didnt seem interested in doing very much or anything. But anything we actually did was very biased towards christianity, and there was only a little bit that I can recall on "other" religions.

Suff

me being a Muslim i found it all over the place, it doesnt give a conculsion to any thought or point in the program.

[edit] (snip) While your heart may be in the right place thats not allowed here.

the_new_mr

I found it pretty good. Definitely one of the better programs on Islam produced by non-Muslims that I've seen. It's definitely not perfect but it's pretty good.

You can now stream all 3 episodes using realplayer from their site at:
http://www.rte.ie/tv/whosafraidofislam/index.html

Each episode is split into two parts.

Twigy

As some you said,it was very interesting but very non specific. It was more like random bits of imformation with no real root to it. It didn't seem to be going anywhere if you know what i mean.

sports

Hello,
Well I had seen the other 2 shows and I would have liked to see more about Irish Muslims be they a convert from christianity or Irish born muslims from and Irish muslim family.
I felt major issues to other countries and other societies with different socio economic situations prevailed and not enough in an Irish context to be of real benifit to the Irish viewer.
What do you all think.

Thanks,
Sports

the_new_mr

Well, as it happens, the third episode covered a bit more of what you were looking for with an Irish convert from Cork who's living in America.

I think that one of the major goals of the show was to present what Islam was in general and to show that a majority of Muslims were not like the terrorists and to eradicate some misconceptions about Islam. I believe it was quite successful in this respect and was probably why he did the whole world tour thing (which must have been cool ). Might have been better to concentrate a bit more on Islam in Ireland in episode 3 I guess but I think some other shows have covered this well enough in the past.

I can only think of one at the moment. It was an episode of "Would you believe?" (maybe the only episode with that name... not sure really) that had a couple from Galway. The woman was someone who had rediscovered her Irish roots and the man was a convert. Was very interesting but didn't get to see all of it unfortunately.