Infidel Dog

To the simple, rugged men of mountainous Nepal, the word "muhammad" means great and strong. It seems a fine name to give a faithful dog. To the touchy Moslem minority in the state of Uttar Pradesh near New Delhi, however, the same syllables, no matter what their spelling, mean only one thing: Mohammed, the Prophet. One day last month a Nepalese traveler named Maganlal Shah came to Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh and lost his dog, a dog so beloved that he led it with a silver chain. Maganlal advertised in the Lucknow Pioneer: "Lost, from the Hindustan Hotel, one fox breed dog, brown color, long hair, answers to name Muhammad."

The ad succeeded in restoring the lost Muhammad to his owner, but that was not all. It aroused the ire of some 100,000 affronted Moslems who claimed their Prophet had been insulted. Some 5,000 of them jammed the streets in front of the Pioneer's offices shouting "Shame." Students boycotted school, and businessmen shut their shops. A protest meeting was held in the city's biggest mosque. In the state assembly, a Hindu Communist took advantage of the situation to decry the government's "indifference to the resentment of the Moslem minority." The Pioneer published an abject apology for having run the ad, and Dog Lover Shah was arrested for offending the public.

Last week, as the battle continued to rage, Muhammad and his baffled master, out on bail, fled back to the mountain fastnesses of Nepal. After all, as Maganlal said, "A man can change his name but a dog cannot. No dog will answer to a different name."

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