Language to Live By

Language matters. To illustrate: the power of persuasion bought the lot, moved the mounds, erected the beams, and built the very buildings and chairs in which we now sit. Language moves people just as profoundly; our values are the children of innumerable dialogues, and we care for them as we care for kin. Where values and dialogue converge--at the table of inter-religious discourse--the language we employ matters now more than Everest.

Barack Obama’s first formal interview as President reconstituted the tone of Muslim-American relations to one of mutual respect and conciliation. Tuesday’s interview was unprecedented for being the first time an American President spoke to a Middle-Eastern news-network for his inaugural sit-down chat, yet this exchange was historic for another reason. Rhetoric aside, Obama’s interview with Al-Arabaya’s Hisham Melhem followed a precedent that was set over 1,200 years ago in Baghdad.

It was there, 150 years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death that the first recorded inter-religious dialogue between the leaders of the Muslim and Christian faiths took place. This two-day Apology, or “defense of faith” between Patriarch Timothy, head of the East-Syrian Church, and Caliph Mahdi, the spiritual and temporal head of Islam, stands as a monument to the most fundamental principle of discourse: to show mutual and sincere respect for your fellow human.

And it begins with language.

The Caliph, who it should be said allowed freedom of all worship within his domain, was moved by the eloquence and forth-rightness of his Christian guest to cheekily remark, “If you accepted Muhammad as a prophet, your words would be beautiful and their meanings fine!”

Equally forthright, Tuesday’s host began his conversation with the President relaying the popular Muslim sentiment that the United States, in their cultural and political hegemony, has resembled of late their own brand of religion. To which the President responded with a truth so simple, yet often so tragically overlooked: “regardless of your faith people all have common hopes and dreams.” Muslim, Jew, or Christian: all God’s children deserve to feel safe; every person treated with the ethic of reciprocity, the grace of all major religions.

Huston Smith, who devoted his life to distilling the good from the many persuasions of faith, said that in order to take our own religion seriously, we must first dignify the adherents of others “as men and women who face problems much like our own.” Furthermore, “we must rid our minds of preconceptions that could dull our sensitivity to fresh insights.”

The insights, perhaps, of a benevolent neighbor, he who “wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” So that we may “do ye also to them likewise.”

Because we are not so different after all.

-Joseph Picha