Arabs, Muslims, Coca-Cola.

I have to admit it, I was a but nervous about coming here. I'm an American with a Jewish last name (no I'm not, but my Pediatrician sure was) and we all know about what's gone on over the last 6 years and more. So as visiting an Arab/Muslim nation was something of a challenge. But I'll admit this now -- I've come to like them.

They are warm, friendly people -- even funny at times. I had to get past seeing them as the "other" -- to get past how I've seen them since 9/11 and before. The vast majority are sincerely living their lives the way they think God wants them to, and most genuinely like Americans, along with everyone else. I don't understand their culture and they don't understand mine. But at the end of the day they're more people Christ died for to redeem out of Adam's fallen race.

And before I go any farther, Arabs and Muslims are not the same thing. Most Arabs are Muslims, but most Muslims are not Arabs. Most are to the East of here, in Iran, Pakistan, India, Malaysia and Indonesia, etc. And there are plenty of Arab Christians here since the first century AD -- more on that later.

And while the West and the Arab world have tended to be on each other's periphery all this time, there's been a lot more sharing of ideas and culture than we may think. Many, if not most, of our musical instruments descend from Arab roots, like the guitar and the violin. So what does this have to do with Coke?

Islam came to seriously limit if not forbid artistic depictions of images -- taking God's command against making a graven image to the hilt. So the Arabic Muslim world's artistic drive went into decoration - hence the elaborately decorated Mosques. Europeans came up with a word for something fancy or decorous -- Arabesque -- meaning Arab-like. And since they copied the Koran by hand, a great deal of their artistic drive went into Calligraphy of their flowing script. They became masters of it. So did we. We wrote everything by hand as well for a great long while, including the Bible and everything else -- books, official documents, letters, etc. So we had highly developed, beautiful calligraphy of our own. But we may well have learned a lot from them, or we both learned from each other.

I don't know anything about the history of Calligraphy in the West, but something struck me as I was looking at a can of Coke. It's always interesting to see this quintessential American product all over the world and to see how it looks in a foreign language. I couldn't help but notice that the Arabic word for Coke bears more than a passing resemblance to the fancy scripted logo we all know. I have to wonder if the Coca-Cola script logo doesn't owe something to Arabic calligraphy a long while back, especially the ornate letter C. Have a look for yourself. I'm not saying the way to world peace is through Coke or Calligraphy -- but understanding that we have more in common than we may think can't hurt.

We all seem to love Coke -- that's something. And God loves all of us -- that's the Real Thing.