Engaging the Future: Like the Difference Between Flowers
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How do you raise a child who can respect differences between individuals and groups? What is the role of parents? Religion? Schools?
Below is an identity chart for a high school student from the United States.
Create an identity chart for Shawkat Toorawa. Include not only facts that make up his identity but also the values that are central to who he is and how he sees himself.
Toorawa writes, "My wife and I teach our children that different people do different things, behave in different ways, eat different foods, speak different languages, have different complexions, but that these differences amount to nothing more complicated, and nothing less spectacular, than the difference between flowers, each a different color, size, scent and so on." What do you think he means? What is the proper response to difference?
What is Toorawa's message? Can it be taught in schools? What would need to happen to impart the lessons? Are there people who would find Toorawa's message threatening? Why do you think they would be challenged by it?
Toorawa describes his school in Singapore this way:
It was a school that celebrated the multiple identities of the students, which welcomed diversity of faiths, convictions, and practices and which was serene in its own largely Christian origins. I say this because this serenity, on the part of anyone, allows for empathy. Extreme attachment to one's origins - imagined, constructed, or real - creates barriers of dogma and constriction; excessive laxity about these undermines and perhaps even devalues difference. There is a serene middle ground, a golden mean.
What do you make of Toorawa's observations? What do you think the "serene middle ground" looks like? What allows individuals to get to that space?
Like Toorawa, Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi understands the importance of learning from others who have had different experiences. She begins her book Scheherazade Goes West with this anecdote:
If by chance you were to meet me at the Casablanca airport or on a boat sailing from Tangiers, you would think me self-confident, but I am not. Even now, at my age, I am frightened when crossing borders because I am afraid of failing to understand strangers. "To travel is the best way to learn and empower yourself," said Yasmina, my grandmother, who was illiterate and lived in a harem, a traditional household with locked gates that women were not supposed to open. "You must focus on the strangers you meet and try to understand them. The more you understand a stranger and the greater is your knowledge of yourself, the more power you will have." For Yasmina, the harem was a prison, a place women were forbidden to leave. So she glorified travel and regarded the opportunity to cross boundaries as a sacred privilege, the best way to shed powerlessness. And, indeed, rumors ran wild in Fez, the medieval city of my childhood, about trained Sufi masters who got extraordinary "flashes" (lawami) and expanded their knowledge exponentially, simply because they were so focused on learning from the foreigners who passed through their lives.2
Why do you think Mernissi believes it is so important to understand strangers? What opportunities do you have to learn from others who have different backgrounds? Whose responsibility is it to create those opportunities?
Becky Robinson, a Facing History and Ourselves student from a suburban high school, reflected on her experiences getting to know students from an inner-city high school during a student discussion group:
...When we got together, the first thing we all noticed was our similarities. We all like music, TV, movies, and sports. We are all teenagers and that in itself, ties us together. We have to deal with growing up, maturing, and learning. These facts help build a bridge over the walls between us. There was not a defining moment when we realized there were some similarities. Just as we don't notice the building of the walls, nor do we notice the building of the bridges over them.
Building a bridge over the wall doesn't make the wall disappear. We may have found things in common but that doesn't change our differences, and I wouldn't want to change our differences. Our different races and different backgrounds and different types of education are what make our friendships interesting. We can learn so much more from each other because of our differences and we can become friends in spite of them. We have been given the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with people we never would have met without Facing History.
I am amazed that it took me 18 years to be in a situation like this one, and I am amazed at how unique I find the situation to be. Building bridges between cultures was not a difficult thing to do. We met, we talked, and we laughed. It makes me wonder why in general this is such a hard process....3
What did Robinson learn from her experiences about difference? How are her comments similar to the point that Toorawa makes? Robinson writes that building bridges was not difficult, yet she also wonders why; in general, it is so hard. How would you respond to her comments?
1. Shawkat M. Toorawa, "Reflections of a Multicultural Muslim," (lecture, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, April, 19, 2001) available at http://www.violence.neu.edu/Shawkat.Toorawa.html
2. Fatima Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West (New York, Washington Square Press, 2002) p. 1
3. Becky Robinson (Presentation, Facing History and Ourselves, Chicago, Il, April, 2004).
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Shawkat
M. Toorawa defies stereotypes. He has lived on three continents and
speaks five languages. His experiences at home and in the world have
contributed to his belief that it is important to value both his own
identity as well the identities of others. As a Muslim who has lived in
Asia, Europe, and the United States, Toorawa has, again and again, in
different places, found himself linked to Jews.
-
I do not
know when I first became aware that I was a Muslim-probably around the
age of four when Abdullah Diop, a Senegalese graduate of the world's
oldest university, in Cairo, was hired by my parents to come daily to
our apartment and teach me the Arabic script and tell me the stories of
the prophets. That would have been the first time I would have heard
stories about Jewish people, but I do not remember the identification.
I say I do not remember, not because my memory has failed me, but
because it was not singled out in any significant way.
When I was five, I started attending the English School of Paris. My father had explained that the principal, Mrs. Cosyn, a Scotswoman, had insisted to Nazi authorities in 1940 that the school be allowed to continue to serve the children of expatriates and that they were not welcome to occupy the premises-and they did not. That is when I first learned about the Nazis.
I learned in primary school about Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. I remember learning about the Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea and how it echoed what I was being taught by Abdullah Diop. I remember learning that Jesus was the son of God -my Children's Encyclopedia at home said the same thing. And I remember that my parents told me that different people believed different things. That we were Muslims and consequently believed that God could not have a son, but that He loved Jesus dearly. I was told that we did not believe that he had been killed or that he had died on the cross, but that Christians did, and that was OK. I remember getting a little chocolate Jesus in a candy manger every year from the school, and my parents never objected.
At school, I was the only person who wouldn't eat meat in my age group. I would be given plain yogurt with two lumps of sugar and fruit when everyone else had meat. No one made fun of me, but I did ask my mother why I couldn't eat the meat my classmates were eating. We could, we just don't, she told me. We follow certain rules, others follow different rules. We aren't better than your friends, they aren't better than us. This sank in right away. My wife and I teach our children that different people do different things, behave in different ways, eat different foods, speak different languages, have different complexions, but that these differences amount to nothing more complicated, and nothing less spectacular, than the difference between flowers, each a different color, size, scent, and so on.
We used to buy our meat in the Algerian quarter of Paris. One day, the Muslim butcher said something to my father that created doubts in his mind about the meat. From that day on, we only ever bought our meat from the kosher butchers down the road. We ate out at Boule de Neige, an Algerian Jewish restaurant.
I began to understand that being Jewish was a lot like being Muslim. That a belief in one indivisible God, attention to ritual and diet, and what I would later understand was a shared and intertwining history that created affinities and empathies which it was hard to find in mainstream French and European culture, tied us together.
-
My father was
transferred to Osaka and then to Hong Kong in 1972. We performed the
pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj, before traveling to Japan. I have been
again since, but I remember that first trip like it was yesterday. I
remember also that our fellow pilgrims from Mauritius, Réunion, South
Africa, and elsewhere, would talk about the "Yahud," as if they were
something to malign, distrust, and demonize. I remember images of the
1973 Arab-Israeli War on television and I began to understand that
[some] Muslims insisted on making a link between the Palestinian cause
and Islam, and between Zionism, the State of Israel and Jews worldwide
and from all time periods. This is an elision of identities and
histories, a monolithizing I have spent my life rejecting....
We moved to Singapore in late 1973 where I attended an international school. Singapore is about 17% Muslim. But at a school for expatriates, I was the only Muslim in my class, and one of only a handful at the school. It was a school that celebrated the multiple identities of the students, which welcomed diversity of faiths, convictions, and practices, and which was serene in its own largely Christian origins. I say this because this serenity, on the part of anyone, allows for empathy. Extreme attachment to one's origins-imagined, constructed, or real-creates barriers of dogma and constriction; excessive laxity about these undermines and perhaps even devalues difference. There is a serene middle ground, a golden mean. I read the Lord's Prayer at assembly, even though I didn't have to; I sang Christmas carols, and still do.
In 1977 I needed glasses. All our Muslim friends told us that the best optician in Singapore was Isaac Benjamin, so it was that I began a friendship with someone whose family members had been killed by the Nazis. We learned this in 1978 when the series "Holocaust" showed on Singapore television, creating a sensation on an island that still remembered its own Japanese occupation, and that had a Jewish population. I remember my father asking Mr. Benjamin if he was watching the series. He said he was, but that he wondered whether it wasn't best to remember without representing: never to forget, but also never to project....
My relatives in Mauritius trivialized anything Jewish, demonized anyone Jewish....
In 1981 I left Singapore for the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied Arabic and where I met many Jewish people. But whereas I had known many Jewish people before, and knew Jewish culture, ritual, and custom, I, on the other hand, was the first Muslim most had ever met. They assumed I was Arab-complicated by the fact that I decided to major in Arabic, a language I knew only how to read without comprehension. They assumed that my theological and political positions were one and the same, that that position must be the position they imagined all Muslims-remember, a billion people-held worldwide. Even though they had never met a Muslim.1
How do you raise a child who can respect differences between individuals and groups? What is the role of parents? Religion? Schools?
Below is an identity chart for a high school student from the United States.
Create an identity chart for Shawkat Toorawa. Include not only facts that make up his identity but also the values that are central to who he is and how he sees himself.
Toorawa writes, "My wife and I teach our children that different people do different things, behave in different ways, eat different foods, speak different languages, have different complexions, but that these differences amount to nothing more complicated, and nothing less spectacular, than the difference between flowers, each a different color, size, scent and so on." What do you think he means? What is the proper response to difference?
What is Toorawa's message? Can it be taught in schools? What would need to happen to impart the lessons? Are there people who would find Toorawa's message threatening? Why do you think they would be challenged by it?
Toorawa describes his school in Singapore this way:
It was a school that celebrated the multiple identities of the students, which welcomed diversity of faiths, convictions, and practices and which was serene in its own largely Christian origins. I say this because this serenity, on the part of anyone, allows for empathy. Extreme attachment to one's origins - imagined, constructed, or real - creates barriers of dogma and constriction; excessive laxity about these undermines and perhaps even devalues difference. There is a serene middle ground, a golden mean.
What do you make of Toorawa's observations? What do you think the "serene middle ground" looks like? What allows individuals to get to that space?
Like Toorawa, Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi understands the importance of learning from others who have had different experiences. She begins her book Scheherazade Goes West with this anecdote:
If by chance you were to meet me at the Casablanca airport or on a boat sailing from Tangiers, you would think me self-confident, but I am not. Even now, at my age, I am frightened when crossing borders because I am afraid of failing to understand strangers. "To travel is the best way to learn and empower yourself," said Yasmina, my grandmother, who was illiterate and lived in a harem, a traditional household with locked gates that women were not supposed to open. "You must focus on the strangers you meet and try to understand them. The more you understand a stranger and the greater is your knowledge of yourself, the more power you will have." For Yasmina, the harem was a prison, a place women were forbidden to leave. So she glorified travel and regarded the opportunity to cross boundaries as a sacred privilege, the best way to shed powerlessness. And, indeed, rumors ran wild in Fez, the medieval city of my childhood, about trained Sufi masters who got extraordinary "flashes" (lawami) and expanded their knowledge exponentially, simply because they were so focused on learning from the foreigners who passed through their lives.2
Why do you think Mernissi believes it is so important to understand strangers? What opportunities do you have to learn from others who have different backgrounds? Whose responsibility is it to create those opportunities?
Becky Robinson, a Facing History and Ourselves student from a suburban high school, reflected on her experiences getting to know students from an inner-city high school during a student discussion group:
...When we got together, the first thing we all noticed was our similarities. We all like music, TV, movies, and sports. We are all teenagers and that in itself, ties us together. We have to deal with growing up, maturing, and learning. These facts help build a bridge over the walls between us. There was not a defining moment when we realized there were some similarities. Just as we don't notice the building of the walls, nor do we notice the building of the bridges over them.
Building a bridge over the wall doesn't make the wall disappear. We may have found things in common but that doesn't change our differences, and I wouldn't want to change our differences. Our different races and different backgrounds and different types of education are what make our friendships interesting. We can learn so much more from each other because of our differences and we can become friends in spite of them. We have been given the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with people we never would have met without Facing History.
I am amazed that it took me 18 years to be in a situation like this one, and I am amazed at how unique I find the situation to be. Building bridges between cultures was not a difficult thing to do. We met, we talked, and we laughed. It makes me wonder why in general this is such a hard process....3
What did Robinson learn from her experiences about difference? How are her comments similar to the point that Toorawa makes? Robinson writes that building bridges was not difficult, yet she also wonders why; in general, it is so hard. How would you respond to her comments?
1. Shawkat M. Toorawa, "Reflections of a Multicultural Muslim," (lecture, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, April, 19, 2001) available at http://www.violence.neu.edu/Shawkat.Toorawa.html
2. Fatima Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West (New York, Washington Square Press, 2002) p. 1
3. Becky Robinson (Presentation, Facing History and Ourselves, Chicago, Il, April, 2004).
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Note: The media selections posted in Facing Today do not necessarily represent the views of Facing History and Ourselves.
