A Life’s Work Battling Religious Illiteracy
As prejudice toward Muslim Americans heightens, a Harvard professor welcomes the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of Shia Ismaili Muslims, and a champion of pluralism
NOVEMBER 2015 – By Meg Murphy for Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Ali Asani is once again disheartened about the destruction of another cultural treasure as a result of narrow exclusivist mentalities taking root in nations all over the world. In the Middle East this exclusivism is associated with the upsurge of tribalism that threatens the very existence of nation-states. When the self-declared Islamic State recently decimated the iconic Arch of Triumph in Palmyra, Syria, Asani was horrified but not surprised. We are suffering a worldwide “clash of ignorances,” he said, as people of different faiths and cultural traditions fail to understand and engage positively with their differences and, instead, in their intolerance seek to eliminate difference by destroying “the other.”
Read at the Source: A Life’s Work Battling Religious Illiteracy | Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/11/battling-religious-illiteracy/
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