Why Is Interfaith Dialogue So Important?

Religions teach the value of human life, and they provide meaning for it. Religious people are an interesting bunch. Some of them like the Red Sox. Some have a Rochester accent. Some are avid gardeners. Some come from secular households. Some are Republicans. Some are Lord of the Rings fans. Some are left-handed. Some have never questioned their sexual orientation. Some are war veterans. Some are divorced. I think you get the idea. There is more to religious people than their beliefs, and when you call upon a religious person, you’re getting all of that person, from her allergies to the allegories she uses to understand the world around her. Because each person understands her world uniquely based on her teachings emphasized by her experiences, there tend to be disagreements.

Disagreements are a little like plastic bags. If we’re acting like infants, we can suffocate in our disagreements when we insist that there is room for just one right view and we all fight over it. If instead we utilize our disagreements to carry forth multiple perspectives, we find that our differences are a source of strength.

Does that sound hokey to you? I admit I had a difficult time fully believing “diversity is strength.” I wanted to believe it, but if you’re a teacher and you catch the end of a fist fight between two of your students, and you get a diversity of viewpoints about what happened, how does that put you in a position of strength if each story contradicts the others?

It took me a long time to understand that I’m engrained or socialized to search for one truth, and by default, anything that contradicts that truth is false. But reality is not that simple. There isn’t an all-encompassing right and wrong, true and false, good and bad. In the case of the fist fight, what if none of the accounts is accurate? Your diverse stories each have some truth in them. Your strength comes from sifting the stories and weighing out a possible reality.

Extrapolating from this example, I find it easier to believe that this country has a lot of potential because it is the home of individuals with extremely diverse experiences and backgrounds. We face so much social inequality, and our values and socio-economic landscape won’t stop shifting! Instead of assuming there’s one right or best way to attack a problem, if we recognize that different methods work better in different regions, we’ll need the diversity of experiences our people have cultivated.

I recently started to understand another reason to appreciate differences and disagreements. Two nights ago, I was delighted to talk with a Chautauquan who explained to me that real interfaith dialogue (where we don’t just agree on everything) helps us to solidify our positions on our beliefs. People who believe the same things as us don’t need to ask us to explain our beliefs, and it’s really when we articulate what we believe and our reasoning or understanding for it that we learn more about ourselves. So we need people with different beliefs who respectfully challenge, listen, and share experiences with us.

The beauty of interfaith dialogue starts when we make a commitment to respect our dialogue partner and listen with an open mind when we would rather ‘gift’ our partner with our own experiences. The importance of interfaith dialogue stems from our rapidly changing world. I have access to a small slice of the reality of the world. By engaging in respectful, open dialogue, my understanding of reality is both solidified and questioned. If I keep in mind that reality is more complex than I can understand, then I can accept apparent contradictions that may one day seem straightforward. That’s useful if I’m interested in understanding the world as it is, possibly so I can engage with it in a smarter way. I try to keep in mind that I’ll always have biases, only a few of which I may be aware.

My new mantra is that if I disagree with you, I’ll try to remember that we both may be wrong and right. If I treat you with dignity, I’d like to think I’m not too wrong. Note to self: make mantra catchier. 

Restlessness

A significant facet of my identity is my faith. It fuels my actions, colors my character, and empowers me to seek the best in humankind. As a Muslim Coordinator at Chautauqua, my religious identity is often at the forefront. Muslims are so diverse in our beliefs and practices, and we have so much to learn from each other. What troubles me is when we try to define what it means to be a Muslim. I self-identify as one, but if I don't fit your definition, that's awkward. I personally like to avoid awkwardness, sometimes to a fault. For that reason, I don't like to include religious actions in my definition. It's a little problematic because beliefs should be followed by action, but I'll leave it to the believer to give good-intentioned significance to one set of actions over another when it comes to our religious practices. I strongly believe that Muslims are called to perform compassionate actions to our fellow human beings and to all of God's creation, and compassion is one of the cornerstones of the month of Ramadan. 

Ramadan has me restless. At the onset of the month, I told myself that I would watch my words and work at being more truthful with people. Most of the time, I’m brutally honest with myself but rarely share my innermost secrets with others. This leads to people thinking well of me when I’m not sure I deserve it. Compliments are great when they’re genuine and address an insecurity of mine, but they often undermine my regimen of humility. I wish I were better at being humble so that no praise or insult could affect my sense of self. I would prefer that sense of self be in a state of constant flux agitated by my understanding of God in an effort to be more human, but I digress.

I’m restless because of my failure to be truthful, to perform good actions with equally good intentions. I’ve also been untruthful because I’ve said on multiple occasions in the last several weeks that I love my tradition because of the sense of community I find in it. I said this because other Muslims voiced this experience, and I wanted to identify with it. I work to bring the Muslim community on my campus together, and I derive great pleasure from the happiness my work brings to others. However, of all the things I’m most grateful for, it’s not the sense of community I feel when I’m participating in ritual. Sometimes, like on Laylat-ul-Qadr, or the Night of Power on which the Prophet Muhammad first received revelation from God (which I hope to be observing at sunset later today), that sense of community motivates and pushes me to a higher spiritual plane. Most of the time, however, performing ritual in community is personally debilitating. It’s like finding $20 on the road and noticing that someone else saw you find the money, and when you turn it into the authorities, you don’t know how much that onlooker influenced your action. You hope you’d have turned the money in regardless, but you’ll never know. The good deed feels tainted. I wish I didn’t question the influence of my religious peers on my religious practice. God willing, I will one day trust that I act truthfully. In the meantime, I pray for strength and compassion.

Restlessness isn’t inherently a bad state to be in. I’m thankful for the weaknesses in myself that I’ve come to better understand, for I gain the ability to make progress. I’m thankful for the network of friends I can reach out to when I cripple myself with judgment, for in making myself vulnerable, others can heal wounds I’ve treated unfairly.  And I’m ever-so-thankful to acknowledge that I’m having a bad day, for the sun will rise on a new day within an hour, and I can better appreciate a good morning after having a not-so-good night.