"Difference in the community is a sign of Divine Mercy".
'This was the guiding principle of Muslim communities until their encounter with European modernity.'
--Zizek
Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law and way of life. And if God had so willed He could surely have made you all one single community: but [He willed it otherwise]...
--Q:5:48
Faced with 'the other' there is a tendency-perhaps one might say, a natural tendency-to reduce everything to the terms of one's own self-understanding. This is my way. At the cultural level this expresses itself in such sentiments as I don't understand how [...] can believe in such and such a thing. Faced with the plurality of beliefs, ways of life, there is an inclination to simplify by positing one fundamental motivation behind our interests (power, self-interest , evolution) and/or to neglect the possibility of varied manifestations of human nature.
Of course, much of this is done in good faith; the plurality of the world is, from a certain perspective, disconcerting and we can only live in one segment of space and time, thus often finding concepts derived from other segments wyrd or flawed. One has to admit, though, that much of it stems from sheer ignorance and a poor education (and by education we mean a temperament that is fundamentally open to the world, to the wonder of its strangeness).
Here in the west the easiest target of that irreducible strangeness is, perhaps, Islam and so one often hears outrageous things said about the Prophet that bigots would not dare not utter against Judaism for fear of being tarnished with the label of anti-Semitism (and here the whirl of competing claims of victimization gets under way). And the same holds in the land of the pure: the Jew, the Hindu. Again, such an outlook is not to be wholly unexpected given that we live in an age that does not how to talk about anything that is holy and that finds it difficult imagining that some things are sacred (Cavell's wonderful essay on Kierkegaard and Authority). Everything is up for 'scholarship' or comes within the scope of the artist's freedom. To say otherwise is to return to fanaticism and obscurantism.
But what this overlooks is, first of all, our public reason which demands that we talk with others, strangers, in a reasonable way -even if we privately think their views are a bit odd. This is, of course, only a first step, one of common decency and civility. In the cartoon controversy the British press and public made what I think was the wise decision that fraternity and the desire to get along with other people was a better view of liberalism than the abstract notion of rights (the right to say something). It is a version of Gawain: courtesy is the matching of inner and outer, of knowing when to speak and when to keep quiet...reasonableness triumphs over reason in a quintessentially English way.
[In discussions with Hindu friends. Very rarely would they discuss 'controversial' matters -and if we did it would invariably be in private and with kindness and consideration. I think this has much to do with a sub-continental approach to life: there is a sort of fanaticism in a person that wants to speak openly about everything (one thinks of Oprah Winfrey and the American love of confession, the settlers' hatred of the Red Man for his 'secretive nature')]
A second point is that we surely have the capacity to understand much of what is apparently alien. 'Understand' does not mean that one adopt the other point of view but that one understands where 'the other person is coming from'; one understands how it might be possible for someone to take up a position that is not your own. Berlin, in his essay on Vico called it fantasia-imaginative insight, I think; the capacity to conceive of more than one way of categorising reality; Einfuhlung, empathy, informed imagination, something that depends on more than 'facts'. Com-passion: the ability to suffer with others, is the highest form of understanding. What would we be without the ability to get out of our own skins, imagine other selves, other ways of life as profoundly human ways of life?
It seems to me that the hypertrophy of the mind in the modern west is no substitute for this integral intelligence. Technical brilliance and a dazzling array of skills is not a compensation for a broad and humane outlook on life (George Steiner, Errata).
'What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information , but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals , and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos-all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.
Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful than the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the source of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of the intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space.'
---Bertrand Russell, 'Useless Knowledge'
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