Word: prophetizer
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...only a matter of time before one of the teams racing to produce the first human clone either succeeded or just decided to claim it had. Chemist Brigitte Boisselier, president of the biotech company Clonaid, is a member of the Order of Angels of the Raelian religious cult, whose prophet Rael says 4-ft.-tall green space aliens visited him 30 years ago in a French volcano and revealed that all of us are descended from the clones they planted here 25,000 years ago. With her announcement of a miracle baby named Eve and the group's subsequent claim...
...other Western societies need to reclaim their faith from those who kill and maim in its name. With that background, it might seem churlish to cavil at a serious attempt to address both needs. But there is something about the PBS documentary Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet (Dec. 18, 9 p.m. E.T.) that doesn't convince...
Though the film relies too much on shots of the same few antique paintings and murals, it is often gorgeous to look at. (So it should be: no filmmaker worth his lenses ever shot an ugly scene in the Arabian Desert.) Muhammad cleverly cuts away from incidents in the Prophet's life to scenes in which some modern Muslims--including a New York City fire marshal and a nurse caring for the terminally ill in Dearborn, Mich.--explain how the example of Muhammad's life and work sustains them more than 1,300 years after his death. These stories...
Still, the film, which was funded partially by a number of Islamic foundations, tries too hard. When the Muslims in Medina murder 700 Jews, up pops a commentator to insist that Muhammad was not anti-Semitic. When the Prophet allows his followers to take up to four wives, the film stresses that he was, for his time, something of a feminist. When Muhammad leads his troops into battle, it is explained that he did so only because there was no alternative...
...other faiths and people of "the book." Just as the history of Christianity has not always been a testament to the lessons of the God of love, so is Islam's past--and present--speckled with intolerance and bloodshed. What the world needs is not a hagiography of the Prophet or an apologia for Islam but a clear sense that modern Muslims are prepared to engage in an honest debate on the way in which their faith has been perverted by those who kill thousands of innocents. --By Michael Elliott