This festival which took place Sunday, April 28 at the Irmo community Park 1 to 4 PM,  was a splendid success. A beautiful warm day with hundreds of people in attendance, dozens of vendors, a continual presentation of performances on stage, and an astounding display of artwork were the essential ingredients making it such a satisfying event. Cosponsored by IPSC (Interfaith Partners of South Carolina) and the town of Irmo, it was the result of a rather remarkable story of interfaith tensions, resolutions, and the eventual formation of critical new alliances. More about that history a little later.

A key factor in the success of this festival was the deep involvement IPSC’s Mary Kennerly. Mary has deep ties throughout the community and served for many years as a principal in the local high school. For me the most outstanding element was the art contest for the youth. IPSC produces a calendar each year which features the artwork of our youth on the theme of peace and harmony in our community. Over 130 entries were received and displayed all around the outside and in several rows through the center of a pavilion which allowed all to view this work in the shade. Those who entered were given the option of also having their work entered into IPSC’s Peace in the Park competition and virtually everyone did. This year’s calendar promises to be stellar in the range and quality of art work that will be able to present there.

On the stage a number of performances were given over the afternoon including dance exhibitions from our Hindu and Sikh communities, musical performances from various cultures in a poetry reading by young people who were selected as the winners of a separate poetry contest addressing the themes of peace, harmony and inclusivity.

A local art teacher organized the presentation of a Rangoli, a giant one dollar like installation on one of the lawns consisting of flower petals, macaroni, various colors of soils all combined into various patterns and pictorial themes. Students, parents and others participated in making it before and during the festival.

And no such festival would be complete without food in this festival delivered in grand fashion. It was food from a number of different cultures and plenty to drink including the very best lemonade I’ve ever been served, made from fresh lemons as you stood in line to receive it. It is very clear from the success of this initial festival that we can expect this to be an annual event drawing people from an ever wider circle in the Midlands of South Carolina.

Now a bit about the remarkable history which led to this festival. In June this year, an opportunity presented itself for IPSC to mobilize in the midst of a local controversy. The Mayor of Irmo, Hardy King, had posted controversial comments about Islam on his Facebook page, prompting calls of both support and protest within the local community. IPSC wrote to the Mayor, offering to facilitate a meeting with local Muslims in Columbia. Mayor King informed us that he had already been approached by Chaudhry Sadiq, friend of IPSC and president of the ‘Peace and Integration Council of North America’ (PICNA) to visit the Masjid Noor Ul Huda. Members of IPSC joined the Mayor at the Masjid, and through those all-important encounters, we witnessed a remarkable transformation.

Following the visit, the Mayor apologized for his original postings, acknowledging he had been received at the Mosque better than his own family reunion! Wanting to build on this initial step, IPSC worked in partnership with the Mayor and PICNA, to host a public forum entitled ‘Demystifying Islam’ in the heart of Irmo, took place from 5:30 to 8 p.m. on Aug. 30 at the Irmo municipal building.  This was a valuable opportunity for people to come and learn about Islam, and to engage with panelists from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian community. This was an opportunity to ask questions and work together towards deconstructing harmful stereotypes, building in their place something far more enduring for strong and peaceable community. King said he was unaware of the ways in which Muslim leaders were distancing the faith from acts of terror until Sadiq spoke to him about it directly. Because of what is portrayed in the news media and on social media, King said, many people may believe Islam is a religion of terror and death. So he believed that this information session was very helpful to combat that perception. He said what started as a sour situation that drew much attention and backlash was, in his eyes, a great opportunity. “God has mysterious ways of bringing people together,” Sadiq said.

It was on the basis of the strong relationship that Mayor King had formed with IPSC that he reached out to us to cosponsor this first annual Irmo international Festival.

Siljander, Mark D. A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim/Christian Divide Harper-Collins 2008
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I learned about this book in a conversation with Rev. Donna Johnson as we were talking about what had inspired us in our own interfaith work. When our conversation moved in the direction of our perceptions about Islam and how we deal with its radical variants she told me about how profoundly this book by Mark Siljander had moved her and changed her understanding of the conflicts between the Abrahamic faiths. When I obtained the book and began to read it I at once saw that there were unique and radical notions here that were worth pursuing. Over the course of the next several days a read the book and began to make notes for this little review of it.

Siljander’s path to his understanding is both surprising and to my mind heroic. He came from a deeply committed evangelical perspective, believing the Koran to be the work of the devil and Islam to be an evil perversion of the traditions of Judaism and Christianity. There were catalytic events that caused extreme emotional reactions in him, which in turn prompted mentors of his to suggest ways in which to reconsider his attitudes and his understanding of the problem.

“This was not the path I set out to follow twenty-five years ago, as a conservative Republican congressman and Evangelical Christian just entering the world of Washington politics. At the time, I believed that Islam was a religion of violence, that the Qur’an preached the destruction of all non-Muslims, and that the Qur’an and Islam were of the devil, as godless as the great evil of communism whose defeat was then the defining purpose of American foreign policy. I believed that Islam and Christianity were contradictory at their core, that the Eastern Islamic and Western Judeo-Christian cultures were irretrievably opposed to one another, and that the only possible solution to this conflict was the conversion of “them” so they would come to think like “us.” My worldview could not have been clearer or simpler—or more myopic.”

Perhaps the most profound turning point was when one of his mentors suggested that he begin to study the Bible in Aramaic, the ancient language that Jesus had spoken when he walked this earth. Already an accomplished and natural linguist Siljander took readily to this new course of study and began to have pivotal insights which built on each other, and combined with later experiences looked at in this new light, ultimately resulted in the chief premise of this book A Deadly Misunderstanding. As an evangelical Christian Siljander regarded it as his highest duty to convert others to his Christian faith. Among his earliest and most important struggles was coming to terms with where this idea of conversion came from. He concluded after much conversation, debate and study that it had no real foundation in the teachings of Jesus. From this point forward he would introduce himself as a follower of Jesus as opposed to a Christian. This would serve him very well in opening conversations with Muslim and even Jewish individuals, for whom Christianity is inseparable from its history of warfare and genocide. It is worth noting how potent the image of “conversion by the sword” is in creating a demonic image of Islam, yet anyone who knows the history of the Crusades understands the irony of this.

The task of translation is fraught with peril and often requires choices which emphasizes an important aspect of what one is seeing and wanting to convey, yet often at the expense of the complete truth of what was said. This is a problem for the most scrupulously honest translator, but even more so in the work of someone with a political agenda. Thus it is the case that translations of Scripture are often very different from the original intent and meaning of the authors. There are many points of inflection that illustrate this in the history of the evolution of the Christian Bible. The Council of Nicaea, a council of Christian bishops convened in the Bithynian city of Nicaea by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in AD 325, being a prime example. In that case not only were there debates on the meanings of words and phrases based on the agenda of the individuals in that counsel, there were also debates about which books should be included in the canonical text. Some of that discussion was of course motivated by the difficulty of proving the origin of some of those works, and clearly in other cases the messages contained in those debated books were anathema to the dogma they were trying to sculpt. For another example consider the Protestant Council of Trent 4 April 1546, which declared which books were to be officially considered canonical. To look at some of these excluded works I suggest you obtain a Catholic version of the Bible which contains the Apocrypha, the collection of books excluded from Protestant Bibles.

Retreating back to the simpler problems of translation, and disregarding agendas, Siljander carefully outlines a number of words and key phrases that are at the heart of disagreement between the Abrahamic faiths. Siljander arrived at his understanding of the importance of the Aramaic language as the root of both Hebrew and Arabic through a number of discussions over a number of years with Islamic, Judaic and Christian scholars and holy men. In many cases the Mullah, Rabbi, Minister or priest exclaimed “this is revolutionary” after hearing Siljander’s arguments. The notion of “a deadly misunderstanding” becomes very clear and specific over the course of this book.

Another critical consideration that goes well beyond any discussion of the value of particular translations of Scripture is the fact that throughout the world the bulk of believers have never read their scriptures, instead they have relied upon teachers who inevitably present to them portions of Scripture which serve their agendas. Radical Islam is the product of two very potent forces, one: the fact that the vast majority of Muslims do not even speak Arabic, and it is a tenet of that faith that in order to understand Islam one must read the Koran in its original Arabic. This is doubly difficult in that even if you are from a country in which Arabic is the official language, reading the Koran is very much like an English speaker attempting to read the old English of Beowulf which looks much more like German than any English we learned in school. And two: the undeniable impact of decades of colonization, brutalization and the theft of natural resources by the Western world in those places where radical Islam finds its most fertile ground.

Well beyond any academic exercise, Siljander’s book is really an exciting and well written journal of a very long, complex and arduous journey towards understanding and bridge building. In an early trip to Syria within a period of 24 hours he was nearly shot by both Palestinian and Israeli forces. With over 30 years of work in government and civil service including six years in the US Congress and an appointment to the United Nations General Assembly, his journey has taken him all over the world. Some of those journeys took him, practically alone and without any US government sanction, into very hostile countries to meet with leaders who were open enemies of the United States. Also early in his career when he was rabidly anti-Islamic a contract was taken out on him by the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who would later be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. Years later when Arafat was visiting Washington DC Siljander was asked to host a private party for him. And although he found this deeply disturbing he did in fact host this party and further found himself being asked to help Arafat craft a speech he was to give the following day. He wanted to include some references from the Koran about Isa, as Jesus is called in the Koran. It may surprise some Christians that there are many mentions of Isa/Jesus in the Koran and in fact one of the books is about him, and another about his mother Mary. Siljander gave him six quotes to choose from and to his surprise Arafat used all six in the talk that he gave.

Siljander met with many heads of state and high officials in all of the Abrahamic faiths. He pursued his unique path to peace in spite of the many on all sides who had enmity towards him. Perhaps the most difficult phase of his work came after 9/11. His advocacy for understanding and communication with representatives of Islam was considered practically treasonous by many of those around him. It was also much harder for him to gain the trust of Islamic leaders, nevertheless he worked very hard to support Islamic moderates and to educate Americans about the misunderstandings which he saw as the cause of all of this conflict.

I too believe that the scholarly understanding of the roots of the misunderstandings between the Abrahamic faiths could be revolutionary. What will determine whether it is or not, is whether or not enough people, a critical mass, become aware of these ideas. I encourage you to do as I have done, read it, talk about it, and buy extra copies to give away. To purchase this book click on the title credit at the top of this page to go to Amazon. It is available cheaply as a used book and is also available for Kindle.

Unity of Hilton Head held its second annual Interfaith Harmony service in alignment with Governor Henry McMaster's proclamation of January as South Carolina's Interfaith Harmony Month. Among the faiths celebrated were Bahá’í, Islam, Judaism, Native American, New Thought, and Taoism. Here below 21 slides each of which have a Time Stamp in upper left hand corner if you would like to quickly navigate to that segment of the video which was made from the audio and these slides. Here's the link to the video: Unity of Hilton Head Interfaith Harmony Service.

Last Sunday January 14th the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Charleston hosted an event in alignment with the observation of January being South Carolina’s Interfaith Harmony Month. The evening featured presentations from different faiths on Angels and Experiences. The event ran from 4 to 6 PM and offered food and drink for all, I especially enjoyed a dish prepared by our hostess Shaila Shroff’s husband Vijay.

Our Hindu hostess selected and introduced the topic. Later on she shared her considerations of the concept of angels from both a Hindu and physicist’s point of view. The first speaker was Dinesh Sarvate who is a trustee of the Temple and Cultural Center and has had priestly duties there as well. Following was Muskan Singh, a Sikh who sang a beautiful song in what I believe was Punjabi, the language in which most portions of the Guru Granth Sahib (one of their sacred texts) was written in. She was followed by her grandfather Gajindav Singh who had a career as an educator in New York. IPSC’s chair Dr. Adrian Bird spoke next, he also serves as Visiting Professor of Christian history at Union Presbyterian Seminary, Charlotte. Howie Comen a long time interfaith activist and a private detective, shared interesting material from both Judaic and Islamic perspectives. Radhika Pande chanted a lovely prayer for us, and finally Herb Silverman spoke from his perspective as an Atheist, he serves on the Mathematics faculty of College of Charleston.
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Adrian and I found the topic interesting in several ways which have resulted in an ongoing email conversation. During his presentation he expressed surprise that in his years of teaching no one had posed a question about angels in his seminary classes. Several of the speakers addressed how we commonly recognize certain kind and caring people as angels. Mr. Silverman shared that he was not expecting to find much agreement with the other speakers and although he disavows supernatural angels he was very comfortable with the notion of natural, human angels. All in all a fascinating and enjoyable evening with a generous and thoughtful group of people. Thank you Shaila.
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​I did not come to Unity, the denomination of New Thought religion I identify with, by way of Christianity, I was attracted to the byline “one God many paths”. Although I had been raised in a Christian home I had difficulty with many of the ideas and stories in the Bible from a very early age and left the church of my family by the time I was twelve. Most of the difficulties that I had with the Bible, came from the Old Testament with all of its smoting, vengeance and warfare and most especially with the book of Job. The idea that God could allow such suffering in pursuit of winning a bet with the Devil was mortifying. As I began to explore Unity, which describes itself as a school of “Practical Christianity” I focused on the New Testament, particularly the teachings of our way-shower Jesus. Five years ago I took an SEE (Spiritual Enrichment and Education) course on prayer which used as its text “How to Pray Without Talking To God” by Rev. Linda Martella-Whitsett and decided at that point to pursue becoming an LUT (Licensed Unity Teacher) which involved taking twenty-five, ten hour courses among other requirements. Last year I took the SEE course on the metaphysical interpretation of the Bible and I finished with a much deeper appreciation for this sacred text as well as a higher tolerance for those elements which on a literal level I found abhorrent. Just this past month I completed the last of those twenty-five course with the on the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.
 
My teacher and guide in this course on the Hebrew Bible assigned as part of our learning materials a series of YouTube videos on the books of the Hebrew Bible that were simply astounding. In introducing what it was they had in mind doing their work on the Bible Project, the content creators made the point very clearly and reiterated it often, that the Bible forms a single book, a single story with many elements and is filled with a number of literary devices, symbols and teaching techniques. This was an eye-opener for me in that of course I knew that most Bible-based believers would make this claim but these folks backed it up with some very clear analysis. The reason this is so important to me is that through this lens I began to understand something which had perplexed me for a long time in my interfaith work regarding what Muslims would call “the People of the Book”. Certainly we understand that the Bible is shared in part by three religions. The first five books which comprise the Torah are the central Scriptures of the Jewish faith. The rest of the Old Testament is important in part or in whole to most if not all Jews. Part of the difficulty between Jews and Christians has been that the Jews often do not regard the New Testament as an extension of their sacred text. As I understand it some of them do accept Jesus as a prophet while not considering him the Messiah they had long been, and still are looking for.
 
All of this came into focus again for me while at a presentation by a Muslim on his faith as part of an Interfaith Harmony monthly series at Pastor Jack Bomar’s United Church in Beaufort, SC. I am not enough of an expert on Islam to be able to verify in any way the things he said but I was struck by a claim he made that Islam was not considered a new religion by Muslims, but rather an extension of and a re-focued approach to the Bible as a whole as Scripture. In his understanding the prophet Mohammed was just that, another prophet of God, and he was quick to point out that the Koran mentions Jesus, whom they revere as a Prophet, many more times than it mentions Mohammed himself. In fact Jesus has his own book in the Koran as does Jesus’ mother Mary. He pointed out that in almost all ways Muslims and Christians agree on who Jesus was and is, including that he had a miraculous birth. However as with their Jewish cousins, Muslims do not see Jesus as the Messiah and most specifically they do not see Jesus as God incarnated on earth.
 
I must confess that as a young hippie I was exposed to a lot of born-again Christians and their very clear-cut and dogmatic view of the world, particularly their notion of being “saved”. I found it deeply offensive. Fast-forward a number of years to where I am now, as a Truth Unity student, and also heavily involved in the interfaith movement. Through some life circumstance as well as my efforts to reach out I am now breaking bread with and trying to reach common ground, with my fundamentalist Christian brethren (correct choice of word in that this is primarily through a Men’s breakfast group). I’ve always seen fundamentalism as a reactionary movement, partly driven by fear and partly seen as a radical solution to the problem of evil we see in the world today.
 
One of the very great gifts I have received in this SEE course on the Hebrew Bible, particularly in reading the books of the prophets, is to see that this is a very old trend. Throughout the entire history of the sacred text we call the Bible there have been those who would see that the culture they were living in had divorced itself from the spiritual principles which it was taught and that the consequence of this split would inevitably be some kind of a disaster as punishment for these sins. As a side note Unity emphasizes the Latin root of the word “sin” as an archery term meaning merely “to miss the mark” and does not encourage people to fear bolts of lightning from an angry god for such transgressions.
 
The Old Testament prophets pointed out three ways in which “wickedness” was manifest, firstly the worship of false gods, and this included Mammon, my understanding of which was a God to whom you would appeal for money and power. Secondly was the abuse and exploitation of the poor, and thirdly the descent into unbridled sensuality including such things as drunkenness, and debauchery and the indulgence in feasts of rich and exotic foods, etc. All of these things lead humankind away from its spiritual roots, and as always there are consequences for losing sight of our true source and nature. After calling out the people on the ways in which they had moved away from their God they generally continued their prophecy with often very explicit out-picturings of the catastrophes coming, such things as being conquered by Babylon or plagues of disease and vermin. Seeing this so clearly in the Old Testament has helped me to understand the fundamentalist Christian in a way that’s not just dismissively seeing them as reactionaries, bound by fear, but in fact part of a long lineage of the visionaries and doomsayers who see themselves as continuing this tradition. This is related in a way to the Christian understanding of the New Testament being a continuation of the story of God’s relation with humankind in history.
 
This line of understanding I think is crucial in coming to grips with fundamentalist Islam. I want to be quick to note that the vast majority of the two billion Muslims that inhabit this earth are peaceful, have a desire to be good in the sight of God and to serve their fellow man. But just as fundamentalist Jews were behind the crucifixion of Jesus, and fundamentalist Christians were behind the Spanish Inquisition and the genocide of nine-tenths of the population of the New World, Islamic fundamentalists are capable of great violence in their quest to purify the world. Their mission is to deal with evil and violence in the world, no matter how paradoxical their methods may seem. Among the things that the prophets were concerned with was with the breaking of the covenants with their God and with the use of lying and cheating as means of amassing wealth and control. In just this way fundamentalist Islam sees Christianity as being a very hypocritical and evil outworking of the principles in “the Book”.

Many people do not know that on the opening page of the official ISIS website is mention of the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret treaty entered into by France and Great Britain in 1916 to divide up all of the Islamic former territories of Turkey between themselves. The most explicit avowed goal of ISIS is to overturn Sykes-Picot. This crucial fact is something I never see mentioned in western media when talking about radical Islamic terroism. Anyone who has seen Peter O’Toole’s great film Lawrence of Arabia knows that this Colonel T. E. Lawrence had been charged by the British government to build an insurrection army to defeat the Turks (which he did most successfully) and that he had been authorized by his government to assure the Arabs that they would be rewarded with home rule in their various lands. From ISIS and Al Qaeda's perspectives, and even from those of non-radicalized Muslims, this great betrayal was clearly a ruse to gain control of and to exploit the peoples of these lands. Certainly the extraction and export of petroleum for almost the sole benefit of the West confirmed their darkest fears.
 
Many of those Islamic fundamentalist Imams see themselves as legitimate heirs to the tradition of the prophets of the Old Testament. Not only are they quick to point out the iniquities (in most cases the very same iniquities of those of Old Testament times) but to prophesy the inevitable outcome of the “wickedness” of the West. Beyond the grievances I’ve outlined is the outrage of the more conservative members of these cultures when confronted with the Western values that are portrayed in motion pictures and in advertisements for consumer products. This includes the blatant sexuality, the gratuitous violence, the un-tempered extravagances of the very wealthy, and in the clear, unmistakable exploitation of the poor and of the land, the Earth itself, for the profit of the very few. I have no doubt that this understanding they have of the continuity of the story of the peoples of “the Book” could go a long way towards fostering understanding between one another. It could be the basis of much needed dialogue amongst these peoples, who between them (Christian, Muslim and Jew) comprise nearly two-thirds of all the believers alive today on earth.
 
With my opening paragraph confession about my reservations and reluctance to invest time in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, it might seem as logical, perhaps inevitable that this class on the Hebrew Bible ended up being my last SEE course, and certainly that is a factor. But I have come to believe in the Divine manifesting in my life through perfect timing. I am deeply grateful that it was my last class in this course of study. Even as recently as a week before I heard that young man speak with such conviction about his Islamic faith, I would not have been ready for the great gifts that have come to me through this study. The term “The Peoples of the Book” came from the Prophet Mohammed and was used in part to justify special treatment, exclusion from taxes for one, not afforded to the Pagans which were a majority in these lands at that time.  My hope and prayer is that this understanding may become a basis for defusing the great dangers that radicalized monotheists pose for our shared world.

The title is intended to be provocative and to raise some questions, such as “Why does he like Muslims?”, or “How many Muslims has he met?” or even “Why is he telling us that?” Good questions all. I have been involved in Interfaith work for over forty years and have developed some high level overviews and arguments for the value of Interfaith work, the intrinsic value of individual religions, even an elaborate defense of Swami Vivekananda’s statement in his keynote speech to the first Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893 “We believe all religions are true”.  But I’ve been reading Eboo Patel’s book Interfaith Leadership lately and I have come to realize that my natural willingness to defend the rights of Muslims to practice their faith was arrived at slowly after much thought and debate, but my story (a very important word “story”) begins long before any real consideration of these issues, with my experience teaching English as a Second Language to Muslims at Utah State University in the mid-seventies, a point in time where I self-identified as an Atheist. Over the course of four or five years I taught several hundred students from all over the Middle East, Iran and parts of Africa. I found them generally warm, engaging and hospitable. It was twenty years later that I first heard the word “Jihad” even though some of those students were Palestinian or Libyan for instance and had very strong political opinions.

I was raised in the Mormon community of Bountiful, UT and attended that church until I was maybe twelve. The Latter Day Saints (LDS) as the Mormons are formally known, feel a strong kinship with the Jewish people, some going so far as to refer to themselves as “the other Chosen People”. Although I left the LDS faith while quite young I still had strong sympathies for the Jews and for the state of Israel. Because our community in Bountiful was so homogeneous I wasn’t really exposed to religious bigotry until I was in basic training in the military. One poor kid came down with a bad summer cold and as it turns out he was Jewish. It wasn’t long before I heard such phrases as “don't catch the Jew Germ” and other slurs. My natural response was to come to Bernard's aid and, as I had no arguments or positions to defend, I chose being his pal as a defense. I had him teach me Hava Nagila which I’d vaguely remembered from Fiddler on the Roof. We sang it at the top of our lungs… I’m not sure this really helped except I never heard “Jew Germ” again.

Fast forward to my years at Utah State and to the "Hub" where we gathered to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. Surprisingly the most boisterous, laughing tables were occupied by Middle Easterners, which made me feel comfortable and drew me in enough to allow me to begin asking questions about the volatility and warfare in that region. I soon came to realize that things were much more complicated than I originally believed. We had a lot of political discussions, but also I heard a great many personal stories which made for deeper connections. I really was quite taken by the cultural warmth and hospitality of these primarily Arabic speaking Semitic peoples. I say that in contrast to the large presence of Iranians, or Persians as they generally called themselves, who were also Muslim, but Caucasian for the most part, and many were quick to remind you of that. The national/cultural presence of these Farsi speaking folks was not as lighthearted or welcoming, they sat by themselves for the most part, somewhat more distant and reserved. Although when I began to teach I made good friends among them as well. It turned out they had plenty of reasons to be cautious as they fell into two strong factions, the loyalists to the Shaw of Iran and the revolutionary forces which eventually toppled the Peacock Throne.

So back to the questions I intended to spark. I’ve known hundreds of Muslims, made many friends and have participated in weddings and other celebrations, and yes, "broke bread" with them and I stand by my claim that I’ve never met a Muslim that I didn’t like. Since they are just people, like many another, I count myself lucky in who I have met. Certainly I’ve read of Muslims who have committed atrocities and I’m pretty sure that friendship would not have been possible with them, for same may be said for partisans in Northern Ireland or guerrilla army members of FARC in Columbia, just to point toward a couple other troubled places. My liking the Muslims that I’ve known also probably has very little to do with their religion. When I think of Muslims my mind doesn’t instantly go the troubles, to religious tensions and ideological chasms, but rather to specific people I came to know and like. For that I count myself lucky as well. Perhaps this is true in large measure because we shared and listened to each other’s stories and made human connections. Eboo Patel has challenged me deeply in almost everything I’ve read of his and I’m grateful that he has, because it has inevitably grounded me in my existence as just one man with his own unique history and stance, thereby allowing me to operate as an advocate of Interfaith Harmony in a more authentic and effective manner one-on-one. Mr. Patel has made me more sensitive to a number of subtler issues, but especially he has reminded me that in conversations it comes down to you and me, to your story and mine.

To hate Muslims is as ridiculous and immature a stance as to hate Republicans or Democrats. Certainly long lists of points of disagreement are readily at hand, but no single point is in fact an article of faith for everyone who adopts a label, sports a bumper sticker, or wears a baseball cap with a logo. And in the case of hating Muslims, in any number cases it’s like hating Frenchmen, any element of being French may very well be an accident of birth, that is, one happened to be born in Marseilles or Paris and not a crucial aspect of their identity. That one is born in Egypt or Indonesia (the most populous Islamic nation) is similarly an accident of birth. The tightness with which one holds to the tenets of their faith is as variable as the human experience. Even to the devout, the particular ranking of these tenets also vary widely. Best to come at anyone with the understanding that they came to be in front of you by way of paths that you have no idea of. The more willing you are to hear their story and to share your own, the more likely it is that you will hear one another on religious and ideological issues.