Next is Agdas, which consist of a long, tree lined street that leads to a spread out town center with a large forest park--and of course the Aliyev Heyder monument. Images of this first ruler of independent Azerbaijan are everywhere in this country...

That evening, with the two other fellows in the boarding house/home hotel, the news talks about riots all around the Muslim world because some amateur in California made a movie insulting Islam . This all seems so, so far removed from the reality he's been experiencing in the Muslim country of Azerbaijan. Here, the idea that people would riot because someone on the other side of the world insulted their religion is ludicrous (and by the confusion on their faces he can see that his roommates feel the same).

He's gotten so used to this Muslim country where women are always treated with respect on the street--no matter what they're wearing... where religion (if practiced at all) is a personal matter, and nobody is watching anybody to see if they're praying, fasting, abstaining from alcohol or whatever... where things like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict or somebody in America saying something insulting about Islam is nothing more than a news story from somewhere far away...

Seeing images of those riots, from this context, is quite disconcerting.

Next time you read in the headlines "Muslims around the world are enraged because of _______________" you can know that that does not include Muslims in places like Azerbaijan.