This Just In From Tehran

So the brother of Iran’s president walks into a Jewish hospital.   No, it’s not the start of a joke.  Call this story from Teheran political gesture or call it encouraging.   Me, I’m calling it encouraging.   One of the great obstacles facing Muslim states in this century is whether they can find some way to accept religious pluralism (including Shia/Shiite tolerance as well as interfaith pluralism).   

Thomas Friedman wrote about this issue in a recent column.  Here’s a quote from that column, the speaker being Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister now with the Carnegie Endowment in the US:

"No sustainable progress will be possible without the ethic of pluralism permeating all aspects of Arab society – pluralism of thought, pluralism in gender opportunities, pluralism in respect to other religions, pluralism in education, pluralism toward minorities, pluralism of political parties rotating in power and pluralism in the sense of everyone’s right to think differently from the collective."

This is harder said than done.  It hasn’t been achieved very well in the West, where aggressive secularism still fights culture wars with conservative and fundamentalist Christianity.   The theological work necessary to sustain pluralism isn’t easy and most of it remains to be done, but it’s necessary in Tehran, and everywhere else, I would argue.

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/2014/01/10/3219563/thomas-l-friedman-ethic-of-pluralism.html#storylink=cpy

What's With Burma's Violent Buddhists?

Christian Caryl has a good and readable piece on the Foreign Policy website today on the ongoing (and apparently state-sanctioned) violence in Myanmar (Burma) between the majority Buddhist and minority Muslim populations. He notes that this violence, which appears to be state sanctioned, shows that "some of our [Western] idealized notions about the purity of Buddhism don't live up to real-world scrutiny". The reality, he notes, is that Buddhism as it is practised in Myanmar and elsewhere, is subject to the same dynamics that cause other faiths to react in certain ways when under stress.

"All religions -- Buddhism included -- tend to create a powerful sense of collective identity among their followers. All of the great world religions emphasize the sanctity of human life, and strive to limit the use of violence to what's admissible in certain cases. But those careful distinctions tend to go out the window when a group of believers feels that its values are under threat."

As I noted here earlier, what is happening in Burma shows yet again the necessity for inter-religious understanding and dialogue among believers as our best hope for firebreaks against violence between between believers of different faiths.

Location:What's With Burma's Violent Buddhists?

Charles Taylor On Interfaith Friendship As Firewalls Against Prejudice

One of the things I hope to study when I go to graduate school on the army's dime this fall are what models exist for fruitful dialogue between Christians and Moslems. A copy of the United Church Observer crossed my desk at work last week and contained a short but fascinating interview with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor has made a career looking at issues of pluralism, secularism, faith, and social cohesiveness. In this interview, he deploys the metaphor of the prairie firebreak to describe how friendships between faiths and groups can check prejudice and friendship.

"But it’s another way of trying to fight against the growth of these absurd stereotypes that can easily circulate in society and that stand in the way of our living together. . . . For instance, if you learn something about Islam, the diversity is just incredible. And if somebody then said to you, “All Muslims are the same,” you would say otherwise. This kind of measure is essential.

Q Can you elaborate?

A The image that I’ve often used is the image of the firebreak. When a prairie fire breaks out and somebody builds a ditch, the fire can’t jump over. Any friendship across these differences is a kind of mini-firebreak. They’re as irrational as prairie fires, these kinds of mobilizations [of hate]. We have to find a way of creating firebreaks. It’s possible to teach with deep respect things that you don’t yourself believe in. When I was an undergraduate at McGill, there was a guy called William Cantwell Smith who was my teacher. He blew my mind. I was studying honours history, back in 1949. I had to take an optional course, and I took his course in comparative religions. No rhetoric —he wore a gown and walked up and down, and he was just extraordinary, just inspiring. A United Church minister. He had this fantastic understanding of Islam, particularly. He managed to make it live for us.

Q Interfaith dialogue can be challenging. In Christian-Jewish dialogue, even if people have known each other for years and are able to talk about many things, when you get to the difficult topics, such as the politics in Israel and the West Bank settlements, dialogue is very hard.

A Often people don’t say what they really think about the other. [We have] what I call pacifying dialogues to convince each other that we aren’t total enemies of the other, but they aren’t the kind of things that are enriching or appealing or create deeper friendships. You have to be able to say, “I find this belief of yours very perplexing,” or, “I think this is a questionable moral position that you guys are taking. I don’t want to score points against you. I really want to understand.” What makes that possible is when you’re talking unofficially as friends. I go back to these cases in schools. Kids who are in school together from diverse backgrounds can’t diabolize each other, can’t see their friends in that light. This is because their friendship evolves in a way where nobody is a representative of their group."

Taylor, along with evangelist Leslie Newbiggin and William Cantwell Smith, are three chaps going on my reading list this summer as I get ready to go back to school.