More on Muslim names and media coverage
Earlier, I excoriated the Washington Post and the American news media generally for using the English names of Muslim Americans accused of being part of our al Qaeda enemy. These men, like Lew Alcindor and Cassius Clay, adopted Arabic names when they converted to Islam. Yet the media use the Arabic names for the sports figures but not for the accused terrorists.

To which Glenn "Mac" Frazier (link at left) adds:

Excellent points. Then again, the last couple of times I heard him mentioned, they still referred to the musician whose Muslim name I can never remember as "Cat Stevens".

Reader Robert George writes:

Good observation on the press's failure to call al Muhajir by his adopted name. However, I have one quibble: It is most accurate, I believe to say that "Abdullah al Muhajir" is Padilla's Muslim name and not his "Arabic" name. It is most accurate to say that our enemies are radical Muslims, not Arabs. The man formerly known as Padilla, the man formerly known as Walker Lindh, the Abu Sayeff group in Phillipines -- they are all loosely
speaking our enemies, but they are our enemies because they have become radical Muslims ("Islamists" as Lou Dobbs points out) -- not Arabs or Arabic.

Robert, thank you for reading and writing. You make a valuable distinction in explaining the fact that our enemies are violent Islamists, most of whom are Arabs but not all. The reason I said the two American men had changed to "Arab" names, rather than "Muslim" names is this:

I mean they have adopted by Arabic-language names, not that that they have become ethnic Arabs. The Quran was written in Arabic and for centuries Muslims believed that no translation of the Quran into another language was valid. Many still do believe that still, but not all. Arabic is still the "official" language of Islam; the daily prayers, for example, must be said in Arabic (they mostly consist of repetition of Quranic passages).

Hence, one sign of submission to Allah (Islam, remember, means, "submission") for non-Arabs is to change one's name to one of the language of Islam, that is Arabic. So i said they had adopted Arabic names, not Muslim one. But for the debate at hand, it is probably a distinction without a difference.