Tag Archives: Islam

Religions of the World and A World of Religions

Posted on by under Connection

There was a period of time when the term “Turk” was synonymous with “Muslim,” even though Islam originated from Mecca, Arabia.

Most Turks are Muslim, but any Turk will tell you that they are not Arab.

Kurds are Muslim but are neither Turkish nor Arab.

Old Mosque, Edirne, Turkiye. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

Moroccans are predominantly Muslim and speak Arabic but do not identify as Arab.

The Lebanese are usually classified as Arab, but there are Lebanese Muslims and Lebanese Christians.

The nation with the highest population of Muslims is Indonesia, where they are neither Arab nor speak Arabic.

The people of Pakistan are predominantly Muslim and their official language is Urdu. Urdu is essentially Hindi, but is written in Arabic script, whereas Hindi is written in Indic script. People who speak Hindi are predominantly of the Hindu religion.

The people of the Balkan countries of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia are Slavs and all speak a language that is mutually understood among them all. The only thing that separates them is that Serbians are Orthodox Christians, Bosnians are mostly Muslim, and Croatians are Catholic.

Most Latinos identify as Catholic, but for many their religious practice incorporates elements from pre-Hispanic, indigenous faiths that do not align with what is in the Bible and are not sanctioned by the Vatican.

I could go on, but I think the point is made. Religion is, paradoxically, something that both unifies and divides people. For many, one’s religion is both a form of practice and something internalized as a facet of one’s identity, much like ethnicity and language. Many will say that their religion is the true religion and all others are wrong, each pointing at the other.

In addition, it’s tempting to assume that the people who adhere to a particular religion all act the same way and believe the same thing, the concept of a cultural monolith. The reality is that religion, like culture, is diverse and messy. A statement that begins, for example, with “all Muslims are…” will likely miss the mark.

With this in mind, if religion is a search for truth as some would suggest that it is, it seems worth examining why there are so many different religions, different versions of the same religion, and different interpretations of religious doctrine and ritual.

Some say that religion causes more problems than it solves. I say that it is the misapplication and misinterpretation of religion that causes the problems. It is the conflation of cultural preferences with religious truths. It is making religion your cultural or political identity in the place of following the actual tenets of the faith that leads to problems. It is the imposition of “the one” religion upon others who may disagree with that assessment that creates conflict.

If we acknowledge that some people feel they need religion to get by — irrespective of who is “right” — wouldn’t it simplify things if we could whittle it down a bit, such that we have those who follow a religion on one side and the non-religious on the other? Couldn’t we then at least identify that something is being done because of religion, instead of dressing it up as nationality, ethnicity, or political leanings? It would be far more transparent, while also not muddling the religion they claim to represent.

In the meantime, there are hundreds of religions, with hundreds of permutations within each religion, and the only logical way for all of this to coexist is religious tolerance. Get rid of dressing up political rallies as religious events. Dispense with declaring that some form of cultural practice is ordained by a god. End the practice of committing violence against those who don’t believe as you do.

And get back to a place where religion actually provides harmony and value, a place of faith, hope, and love.

****

“Today, religious tolerance and cooperation among Americans cannot simply be a pragmatic or utilitarian undertaking, a mere accommodation to the fact of diversity. No, the source of your commitment to religious freedom is itself a deep religious conviction. Religious tolerance is based on the conviction that God wishes to be adored by people who are free: a conviction which requires us to respect and honor the inner sanctuary of conscience in which each person meets God.” – Pope (now Saint) John Paul II (1995)

Perhaps Travel is Not the Key to Broader Horizons

Posted on by under Compassion

Growing up in California in the 70s and 80s, one of the refrains that I occasionally heard was that travel outside your home will expand your horizons. But does it?

We all have our cultural idiosyncrasies that are a result of where we grew up and who we grew up with. The challenge, then, is what do we do with that. As a young person, I was very much a product of California, a state so vast and independent–almost as if it were its own country–that one could live a full and varied life and never once leave the state. (Some people live a crabbed and limited life and never once leave the state, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Anyway, I have family in New York and traveled a bit in high school, so I was not as parochial as some. But I had a lot to learn, and still do.

Which brings me back to my original point: does travel open doors to greater understanding, as some travel writers suggest? (A recent article proclaims “To travel is to learn.”)

My gut reaction is yes, it does. It seems to me that once you see that there are different ways to achieve the same or similar results, you begin to understand that there is not (with some exceptions) one right way to do things.

And if there isn’t one right way to do things, that means that there are multiple ways of being that are just fine. With an open mind, one will see, at the very least, that one’s preferred (or accustomed) way of doing things may not be the best way.

Growing up, I was acquainted with a elderly couple, Frank and Helen Hitchin. The Hitchins were devout Christians and had spent time doing missionary work in other countries to evangelize the message of Jesus. Frank had spent time in the Belgian Congo and later, both went to Tunisia. There may be other countries that I am not aware of.

In my memory, the Hitchins were stodgy and dull, despite all of their worldly travels. This may be explained by the fact that they were old and I was young. But my grandparents were also old and did not seem nearly as stodgy and dull as the Hitchins.

Photo: Amitav Ghosh

I have a copy of a letter from the Hitchins that I recently obtained. My mother and I were sorting through some of her papers and we came across this letter, written to my parents in 1979 when the Hitchins were doing missionary work in Tunisia.

Most of the letter shows very little in the way of compassion for the Tunisians. Rather, it it strikes me as condescending and tone deaf. It belittles the Muslims for being impractical and bound by tradition. It asks us to be thankful that we are not camel herders and complains that there is no good sharp cheddar cheese to be had. It says with a regretful tone that all the newspapers in Tunis are in either French or Arabic, and the Hitchins cannot therefore read them.

It on the one hand says, disdainfully, that the Muslims can be “fiercely loyal” to their faith and on the other hand says that serving the Christian God is a “privilege” that is welcome despite hardship. It also seems reluctant to call Islam a religion.

And finally there’s this: “Frank just commented that sometimes he feels like [the apostle] Paul — in our rented apartment, a ‘prisoner’ of the Gospel….”

This makes me ask: why were they even there? Did Tunisia leave any impression on them, other than that they were glad to be Americans? How could their missionary work have been effective if they didn’t speak the language, and showed little interest in the Tunisian people’s lives?

So perhaps cross-cultural understanding is not automatic. As much as I’d like to think that stepping outside one’s American existence to learn something new will expand one’s horizons, maybe that’s an illusion.

Or at least debatable. Some argue that the saying that travel opens one’s mind is a false adage. “Travel does not automatically make you a better person,” says Travis Levius, a travel journalist and hospitality consultant. This appears to be true of Mr. and Mrs. Hitchens. I’m not saying that they weren’t good people, whatever that means in the long run. But their travel in the name of Jesus did not, evidently, make them more compassionate towards people of cultures that were different from their own.

True compassion transcends differences in culture, age, language, or religion. And compassion, I would argue, was one of the main teaching points of Jesus. But more on that some other time.

Epilogue: Mr. Hitchin claimed that he would not die before the Second Coming of Jesus. He died in 1996. Make of that what you will.

[Updated 3/17/22 with some corrected information on Frank Hitchin.]