While yapping with my co-worker Tyrone on the subway home this evening, I came to the not-particularly-brilliant-or-original thought: When it comes to public voice and persona, Christians and Muslims have much in common.

In North American culture, "Christian" has come -- in some circles, at least -- synonymous with intolerance, fundamentalism and social conservatism, not to mention the grasping nature of some televangelists like Oral Roberts, who said in 1987 that if his viewers didn't come up with $8 million US, God would "call him home."

But there are all types of Christians. Some of those sects hold liberal social views. But generally speaking, one doesn't hear from them.

Islam, as I understand it (and trust me when I say I'm not exactly a theological scholar), has many different schools of thought within it, but which one has become the de facto voice of Islam? The one synonymous with intolerance, fundamentalism and social conservatism.

Quite independently of that, The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders did an online Q-and-A today. He touched on that issue in a question about drawing Muhammad:

As I understand it, the Koran says nothing about representations of Mohammed -- in fact, it portrays him as the sort of guy who might appreciate such things, and who was quite open to self-effacement and criticism. The idea of bans on representation comes from sharia law traditions that emerged much later in Islamic thought, and have never been accepted by all practitioners. Images of Mohammed have often been produced by Muslims without any controversy — Ottoman art is full of them. People in Iran tell me that markets in Tehran often carry loving images of Mohammed. It really is just the extreme interpretations of Islam, like those promoted by Saudi authorities, that put a stress on this. (This doesn't mean that any Muslim in the world would appreciate a nasty depiction of Mohammed, any more than any Christian would appreciate an obscene image of Jesus). Paradoxically, the Jewish and Christian holy book explicitly prohibits graven images. In all three Abrahamic faiths, it is only the orthodox who adhere to such bans -- but in this case, it was orthodox Muslims who spoke the loudest.

This raises important questions about the coverage of religious groups within our communities. For example, Toronto and the wider GTA have a substantial Muslim population, but how that proportionally breaks down on any spectrum of Muslim beliefs, and who provides representative voices for those groupings, is a question I simply can't answer.

Nor could I do it for any other major faiths in the city. Or the country. Or the world.

But not many journalists could, let alone average citizens.

In the Feb. 9 Timothy Garton Ash column from the Guardian I cited last week, he made the point that allowing Britons to see the debate within the Islamic community over the cartoons was an important thing:

I think the British media have done exactly what they should by letting us hear the voices of Muslim extremists but setting them against moderate and reasonable Muslim voices, as well as those of non-Muslims. There was a riveting discussion on Newsnight, in which two British Muslim women calmly argued with the ranting, demagogic, but in style and accent also recognisably British, extremist Anjem Choudary, of the al-Ghuraba groupuscule. Perhaps it would have been better still if the discussion had been chaired by, say, Zeinab Badawi rather than Jeremy Paxman; but the essential point is that it provided a civilised platform on which Muslims could argue with fellow Muslims. Reporters sweepingly write of "Muslim anger" erupting across the world, but many British Muslims are as angry with the jihadist provocateurs as they are with the Danish cartoonists, as we will doubtless see in the demonstration planned by British Muslims in London this Saturday.

And to know who should be debating, we need to get to know those communities better.