Wednesday, March 28, 2007
come together
I spent the day at the Guardian recording the Islamophonic podcast
which will be available for download from next week. The question that
the programme explores is why Muslims, Jews and Christians cannot seem
to get along. Its something which has long frustrated me. Muslims
and Jews in particular have so much in common that it seems desperately
sad that international politics- and the politics of one specific
region- overshadows all other discussions. Last week I went to an event
organised by the Jewish Community Centre which asked whether Jews and
Muslims had more which united them than which divided them. Sadly the
discussion was mostly about theoretical concepts about shared respect
for holy books rather than the similarities in lived experiences which I
would hoped would be stressed. On the podcast I also talked to the
American author Zachary Karabell who has written a great new book that
challenges the idea that Muslims, Jews and Christians have always been
in conflict. While there have been disputes Karabell shows that there
have also been many times of peaceful coexistence and, crucially, the
times when there have been wars and disputes religion has proved to be a
convenient flag to fight under rather than the principal reason for the
fighting. A useful lesson from the past perhaps when trying to
understand the present.
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