Last Friday night, one of the most important men in the world spoke at Grainger Hall. He is His Eminence, Dr. Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in the last decade or so he has emerged as a leading voice for a tolerant, inclusive and, above all, peaceful Islam — the kind of Islam many Americans don't believe exists. And the kind of Islam that a small group of Muslims, the ones the West are most familiar with, seem bent on eliminating.
To hear him speak to this task is to appreciate his other honorary title: "Islam's Nelson Mandela."
Towards the end of a serious, measured lecture, Dr. Ceric, a former professor, slyly announced to the audience that it was now time for their pop quiz. The night's theme was the basis for dialogue amongst the Abrahamic religions — Islam, Judaism and Christianity — based upon their historical and abiding similarities. Dr. Ceric had argued that proof for the shared thought, or heart, at the core of all three religions was to be found in the texts themselves, in particular the Ten Commandments.
The quiz, then, would feature ten excerpts from three possible sources — the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Qu'ran. It was the audience's job to guess the origin of each excerpt: a classic teacher's trick.
The nervous murmur that spread throughout the audience might have signaled curiosity at the shift from a somber, intellectual discussion of religion, war and peace to the light-hearted nature of the last day after classes. And yet it was impossible not to notice another, deeper irony at the prospect of a pop quiz: the majority of the room was far removed from its salad days.
In the moment, it was funny, because here was a bunch of religion scholars playing student with the Grand Mufti of Bosnia. The results of the quiz proved more than just fun, too (it was all from the Qu'ran), and the lecture ended on a note of substantial hope. In room 1100 in Grainger Hall, the dialogue that would be the key to everlasting peace was taking place. But would it reverberate beyond the lecture hall?
After all, as any communist will tell you, idealism doesn't work from the top-down. No number of academic conferences and meetings with top politicians will transform Dr. Ceric's impassioned argument for "learning to believe, not just believing" into anything more than a rallying cry for liberal Islam.
Further, the prevailing political discourses, and the media that often follows in tow, are notably defined by the very insistence on labels that Dr. Ceric and his academic supporters are attempting to dissolve. But Fox, CNN and Al Jazeera shape mainstream opinion, not the Grand Mufti of Bosnia or the head of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin.
In many ways, since academics and politicians and television executives are having all the discussion, it is college students — and their Eastern counterparts, many of whom receive a different sort of education from al Qaida — that represent the "bottom." It is college students' express responsibility to seize Dr. Ceric's idealism as their own, lest it remain where it can do no good: in the realm of aging authorities.
In this light, the willingness with which campus politics mirror that of the country, and the world, points perhaps to the greatest obstacle to the emergence of meaningful dialogue in the place of ignorant violence. Witness the recent elections, in which checklists were provided by the two, dominant parties, as if belonging to a party disabused you of the burden of possibly weighing each issue separately. The absurd level of competition seemed less like the fruits of conviction than the overzealous, unquestioning adolescent penchant for a good, hard fight. Similarly, the proliferation of "cultural" events on campus seem to exist for the sole purpose of providing an easy understanding (try and understand Southern Asia in a night) where only a mutual, ongoing dialogue, one which focuses on similarities, will suffice.
"It is not easy to speak about peace. It is easy to speak about the wars," began Dr. Ceric in his gentle, yet affirmative, broken English. "More people are impressed with the wars." He may have been speaking to a room of over-interested academics, but it was clear his challenge was directed to students on both sides of the divide, East and West, in whom he trusts to reject the easy answers offered them by the Voices of the world.
Josh Cohen ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in philosophy.
