Interfaith Dialogue and Cooperation to Bring Out the Best of All Faiths

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Posted Jun 18, 2010      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Interfaith Dialogue and Cooperation to Bring Out the Best of All Faiths


by Dr. Robert D. Crane


I.  Interfaith Dialogue and Inclusive Pluralism


The theme of this essay or position paper is the role of solidarity in interfaith dialogue and cooperation to bring out the best of all faiths.  The future of America and of global civilization will depend on whether and when the leaders of each of the world’s nations can join to bring out the best of each civilization in order to build a single civilization of global pluralism.  The purpose must be to bring out the best of the past in order to build both for the present and the future a global federation of independent nations in the pursuit of peace through compassionate justice.


The opposite alternative is mutual demonization whereby members of one civilization join the extremists of another in supporting the extremists’ perversion of their own religion.  In practice, this would bring out the worst of the past to paralyze the present and destroy the future.

The most egregious denial of human rights is to deny the right of others to define and interpret their own religion, because this is a denial of human dignity and human freedom.  In order to develop objectivity, one must go to the source of all the understanding and misunderstanding, namely, the scriptures and tradition as understood by most Muslims throughout history. 

The base case should be Islam as a religion, not Muslims as they sometimes understand and practice it in pursuit of political agendas.  This is the basis of respect both by and for Muslims within the community of the three Abrahamic traditions.  This should be the basis for long-range planning especially for Muslims and Jews, who throughout most of their history during the past thousand years have been each other’s most reliable friends.


Governments, of course, must base policy prudentially on practical threat analysis, not on theory, but equal emphasis should be placed on “opportunity analysis” in the pursuit of compassionate justice through peaceful engagement as an end goal in both domestic and foreign policy.  The base case for all followers of the Abrahamic faiths who share an opportunity mentality, as distinct from an exclusively threat mentality, should be not the extremes but the balanced middle as understood by the great jurisprudents, philosophers, and spiritual leaders over the course of more than a thousand years in interpreting the Islamic scriptures.  These include the Qur’an, the hadith or traditions about the sayings and practice of the Prophet Muhammad and his early followers, and the scholarly writings of the great intellectual leaders, most of whom have been imprisoned or executed for trying to maintain the purity of Islam as a religion and its independence from political control.


Two paradigms of scriptural interpretation have been debated among Muslims since the very beginning.  These are whether the messages of God in the various religions should be interpreted as exclusive or inclusive.  Historically, the exclusive approach, often condemning to hell all who disagree with the particular interpreter, has gained influence and even dominance in the presence of existential fear of perceived mortal threats from the “other”.  Such existential fears fuel the challengers within each religion who would hijack it in their worship of themselves as false gods infused with hatred for everyone who refuses to bow down to their claims to exclusive possession of ultimate truth.


The inclusive approach, on the other hand, welcomes the followers of other paths to God as part of the divine design for all of humanity.  This paradigm of thought, which has been the most pervasive in the spread of Islam throughout the world, has been advanced especially by the Sufis.  The majority of Muslims in the world, both Sunnis and Shi’a, follow one of several Sufi paths.  They believe that the purpose of divine revelation is to unify in common purpose all persons and communities not at the level of politics but at the level of worship and morality. 

The common purpose is love of God, which is every person’s reason for existence, but the paths to this end have always been found in the externals of religious diversity.  As persons converge from the externals on the circumference of a circle toward the Oneness of God at the center, they themselves can become unified in action.  The spiritual leaders believe that this unity in purpose through diversity in means is the only way to turn justice from merely a utopian word into practice.  They believe that this unity in diversity is the only way to turn compassionate justice into a practical reality.


The governing paradigm of thought among those who follow the inner meaning of their religion is loving submission to God in response to God as the Initiator of Love.  This kind of submission, known by Muslims as taqwa or God-consciousness, gives meaning to everything else.  This is the root of the opportunity mentality and is the best basis for dialogue and mutual cooperation in addressing the practical issues of conscience in both domestic and foreign policy in the world today, because it is based on mutual respect among the followers of all the world religions. 


The challenge thereby becomes not a clash of civilizations based on a chasm of purpose between irreconcilable cultures.  The major challenge is not even a chasm of meaning within each civilization.  Rather, it is the growing chasm between humanity and God.


II.  The Politics of Fear


In politics the two most powerful motivators are fear and religion.  This is especially true in places like America and the Muslim world where religion is a powerful force and therefore can be harnessed in the pursuit of power for whatever purpose.


We are now in the middle of an almost unique example of this truism.  Muslims are not the only ones who exploit religion for political ends.  American extremists, both political and religious, are exploiting religion by demonizing Islam as the necessary first and decisive step in a perceived war of self-defense against universal evil. 

A principal weapon in this “war against evil” is the orchestration of words or symbols, known as mimes, in mimetic warfare.  This kind of warfare attacks the mind of its victim subliminally in ways that shape thought without the victim knowing that one’s thinking has been reshaped.

On September 1, 2007, presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, sent out a letter to his supporters pegging his new campaign on a single theme that he hoped would be a sure-fire road to electoral victory in a time of great national peril.  This theme is simple.  He declared, “The transcendent issue of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism.”

Another presidential hopeful, who decided to skip the 2008 presidential contest as a lost cause, was Newt Gingrich, who engineered the so-called Gingrich Revolution in 1994 by taking over both houses of Congress for the Republicans.  Shortly thereafter he laid the ground-work for a new war against evil by calling for a war against Islamic totalitarianism.  On February 8, 1995, at a conference of military and intelligence officers on developing global strategy, Gingrich announced, “I have yet to see a coherent strategy for fighting Islamic totalitarianism.”  In the American lexicon developed in the war against Communist global conquest, the world is full of harmless tyrants who seek only their own power at home and therefore can be co-opted to serve American purposes

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