Mohammedanism

Oh dear. I appear not to have really gotten into this. So, I thoughtI wouldkick start it by rambling about my holiday. Call it self-indulgence if you will, you might be right.

Actually, I don't really intend to ramble on about my holiday in India, excellent though it was, but to despair over the lack of knowledge of people about it. I went with a relatively expensive company on a tour of Northern India - i.e., mostly Mughal monuments. I was the youngest person on the trip - most being middle aged and relatively well off. And this seemed to be a pattern of the various tourists I saw. It's in term time so presumably the student crowd isn't around. My group was pretty good (though my grandmother did once confuse the Hindu temple in Neasden with a mosque - doubtless to the delight of both parties), but the bulk of the other visitors to these places appeared to have to have an understanding of religious geography that stopped in 1600 (or even 600), and ill-equipped to look at muslim monuments

Now, our record of teaching about Islam is pretty poor. A few years ago I picked up a second hand atlas that was used in Westminster school in the 80s, which cheerfully referred to the Islamic regions of the world as Mohammedan. However, Islam has been in the news recently, especially in that part of the world.

In fact, the various exclamations I hear on the subject - prize goes to "I didn't know that Islam had made it so far east - makes me wonder if they have heard of partition (and what it was about), if Malaysia and Indonesia simply don't figure in people's minds, whether they think Bangladesh (or East Pakistan as it was known in their lifetime!) is west of Iran, and crucially - given Delhi is pretty near that Pakistani border - what kind of miltants Pakistan have? It was bad enough earlier this year in Granada when I heard the Americans recognise that "this kind of thing [the Alhambra] makes me appreciate the muslims a bit more", but at least that relied on a knowledge of vanished civilisation; this is a tad more recent.

I despair. For the record, I didn't know there were quite as many Muslims in India as there in fact are, nor that it is the third largest muslim population in the world (list here, with some scrolling needed), so nobody's perfect. Though it would appear some are less so than others.