The Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia visited Effat College the day after Karen Hughes made her splash at Dar el-Hikma. The Canadian ambassador made a huge point of his extreme tact in direct comparison to the 'preaching' of 'our southern neighbor'. I found a couple of things interesting in his talk, and I agreed with a lot of it, but one of his comments hit home very strongly. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Canadians often forget that there's more to the United States than the Northeast." I would venture to add that they are probably unpleasantly surprised when they are reminded of the rest.
Now, I am the liberal child of liberal parents who attends a liberal university in the Northeast, and when he said this I realized that his comment applies equally to Americans - people in the Northeast frequently forget that there's more to the United States than the Northeast. That was a huge part of what made the 2004 election so depressing for us (those of us it did depress) - we had forgotten, or tried to ignore, the huge amount of the country who completely disagreed with us. Well, we can't really do that so much any more. They outnumber us and, for whatever reason, the uber-religious right is making a big comeback. This is not, of course, to say that every Republican is uber-religious. But American religion has really become the domain of the Right, and it's growing fast. Take the current debate on Creationism. I had thought, along with most of my classmates, that this argument ended in the Scopes Monkey Trial. But of course, the tension between religion and 'secular' life is never really going to be solved.
And that makes some sense. From a religious point of view, it's never going to be okay to just 'forget' God, or 'separate' God from some other part of life. Americans like myself have become very good at reasoning religion into an entirely internal, individual relationship with whatever Higher Being you do or do not believe in. There is an entirely different sort of religion, however, for whom that is exactly the wrong way to go about it. This second sort of religion is all about community, and there's nothing like social pressure to help people behave in morally respectable, religiously acceptable ways. And frankly, if I want my child to grow up believing in Creationism, then I don't want him hearing anything about evolution in his biology class. It might give him ideas.
In the New York Times today there is an interesting article, actually fairly depressing, about how two different groups of people can look at the same facts and come away with completely different opinions. The entire idea of democracy is that, like Demosthenes in Athens, I should be able to get up and convince people of my point of view. Obviously this is a little naive, and I realize that American politics haven't worked like that for years, but still... shouldn't that at least be the ideal? The idea of compromise seems to have gone out the window. It is win or die trying these days, and that is only exacerbated by throwing religion (which has never been very good at compromise) into the mix. To go back to this article:
Members of both groups said they had signed up for these charters to be
surrounded by like-minded people.
Isn't it depressing that smart, intelligent people feel it necessary to seek like-minded groups? As someone currently living in a place where everybody but me is like-minded, I definitely appreciate how uncomfortable it can be to hold the dissenting opinion. But in my mind that's one of the things that makes America's emphasis on individual rights and freedom of speech and religion so very important - unless it's protected by law, these things are the first things to go. The other thing I'm beginning to appreciate more about the American system is the belief that more information is always better. If we all have all the information, and we all have similar goals, then reasonable people ought to be able to come to some sort of agreement.
Of course, teaching about all religions, or teaching religious theory, isn't nearly the same as teaching religion, which is what Creationists want.
In Jeddah, here, Islamic Studies is required in school all the way up, including college. Considering that this is an unabashedly Islamic state, this seems reasonable to me. What has caught me by surprise is, I guess, the unacademic nature of the class itself. Rather than teaching history or religious theory or religious teachings, all of which would seem to me to be in keeping with the goal of promoting Islam, they are teaching some generalized set of dogma. For my class, Islam 101, they essentially go through the problems of the world - pollution, unemployment, poverty - and discuss how Islam has solved all of these problems. But instead of providing any concrete methods of preventing pollution, or lowering unemployment, we are merely given sets of Qu'ranic verses which say, in gist, "be nice to the environment". This doesn't even seem useful from an Islamic point of view.
I haven't come to any conclusion on this, but I am becoming more and more aware of the universal nature of the religion-secularism fight. Europe is facing it in the form of Muslim immigrants and Turkey's fight for membership in the EU. Turkey and France are facing it and dealing with it by forbidding the most obvious forms of religious observance like the headscarf. This seems on the face of it unfair from an American perspective. America has the benefit of history - freedom of religion has been one of our tenets for as long as we've existed - but it can only maintain that freedom of religion if it is understood that religion doesn't have the right to intrude on public life. Basically, you can believe whatever you want, but you can't tell me what to believe.
This has always seemed like an extremely attractive idea to me. The problem is, isn't that an ideal, a belief, an ideology? I guess for me the difference is doubt. I am willing to admit that my idea isn't the only one or, necessarily, the best one. People who think there is only one Truth and that they happen to know it frighten me. But obviously the search for truth is an ongoing human quest, and there will always be people who think that they have found it. And perhaps they have.
And that's the Truth.
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