This problem is faced by all organizations or religions that survive a long time, and has a lot to do with what is required in order to survive a long time and across multiple contexts and cultures.
Sincere thinkers in Islam are struggling now with both the problems of "same message in different cultures" and "same message in different times." These problems are at least as large as the clash with Western values, that are visible daily on TV and over the internet.
This is not an easy conversation. In some parts of the Mideast, it seems there is an attempt to preserve the message, seemingly put at risk by Islam's heyday of leading the world in technology, by preserving the culture in which it was written, which means denying the last 700 years of technical progress. That's not working very well.
Spreading Islam to other cultural areas of the world has its own issues. Here's a few excerpts from a piece by Tom Peter in the Christian Science Monitor "Cultures clash in US Mosques" (May 17, 2007). (bolding added).
Like any good Muslim, Ali Karjoo-Ravary went to mosque on Friday seeking spiritual inspiration. What the 19-year-old Iranian-American found, however, was something completely different.
... Even as he made out the imam's words, the message made little sense. "The entire sermon was about 'Don't let a girl pat your back. It can lead to things,' " Karjoo-Ravary recounts.
The imam's disconnect with American culture shocked Karjoo-Ravary. Trying to gauge the reaction of other young congregants, he spotted a cluster of teenagers and 20-somethings toward the back of the mosque... The entire group had tuned out the sermon and was texting busily.
"There's just a very different worldview."Though much attention is given to sectarian differences within Islam – such as Shiites versus Sunnis – equally sizable gaps can exist between regional variants. Every culture that adopted Islam infused its local traditions into the religion – from the food eaten at religious holidays to the social boundaries between men and women. Provided these indigenous customs don't clash with the theological core of Islam, this is perfectly permissible, says Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who leads the Al-Farah Mosque in New York City.
In the US, however, the regional varieties are coming closer together, which can create friction.
"The immigrant generation is still living psychologically in their homeland," says Imam Abdul Rauf. "The second generation is the one that begins to assert itself as belonging to the new society."
Though Abdul Rauf moved to America at age 17, he spent his childhood in Egypt, Malaysia, and England. The experience, he says, taught him the difference between "what is religious and what is cultural."
"In our communities, the challenge is people who just won't let go of ideas that they think define Islam when in fact it just defines the culture in which they were born," says Asra Nomani, a second generation Muslim-American in Morgantown, W. Va., and author of "Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam."
"When [immigrant imams] are helping you and answering your questions, they're giving it from the perspective of wherever they're from without taking into consideration where they are, what's the context, what's the country like, what's the culture of the country," says Gulrukh Rahman, a Pakistani Muslim in New York City who has lived in the US for 12 years. "A lot of that is pushing young people away from the mosque."
Those who embrace foreign imams are often urged to withdraw from American culture, says Ms. Rahman. She worries that these communities will become completely shut off and needlessly reclusive.
"We have to integrate," says Nehela. "I teach my brothers and my sisters here that you have to build a strong relationship with your neighbors. Get to know them and help them."
Again, the problem is that there is huge value stored in the level of control embodied in the existing set of laws, that are always fighting forces that would break or dissolve them. How do you preserve the values of the past without necessarily clinging to the ways these values were expressed in the past. Can content be distinguished from accidents of context?
Similarly, if religion A at one time in history says "X", and religion B at another time in history, in another place says "Y", what is a valid way to determine whether X and Y are the same or different, after accounting for the change in context?
This gets into the nuanced area of distinguishing the "spirit of the law" from "the letter of the law", which a good judge will pay attention to. Many parties today, with very high priced attorneys, stay within the "letter of the law" while grossly violating the spirit. This seems wrong.
So if we believe that crowds have wisdom and emergent perception, and we are trying to figure out what different religions "saw" or "see", we can't get hung up on the words used and try to compare "the letter of the law" -- we need to punch through to the spirit of the law and compare that, corrected for the change in context in space, time, and culture.
And, in turn, that requires some wisdom in distinguishing between, basically, pixels and "an image". Images, it turns out, are subtle things, and far more subtle than strings of symbols or words.
For one thing, images ride up over their pixels with a life of their own, independent of the pixels. You can take a picture of George Washington and change every other pixel to pure
black, or white, or a random mix of the two, and you can still "see the image". No pixel matters or is critical, and yet, they all matter. It's not a picture of my cat.
Most arguments about religion, it seems to me, get lost in comparing letters of the law, or words, or pixels, and lose track of the entire bigger picture. Molehills are made into mountains dividing philosophies and moralities that are almost identical in terms of what behavior they exhort, giving many a convenient excuse to ignore them all.
All of which comes to the realization that understanding how content and context interact is not only a problem of science, or of commerce, or management versus labor, or medicine versus surgery, or clinical health versus public health, but it is also a core problem of theology and interfaith relationships. The battles between subgroups within a religion over meaning of some small thing can blow it all out of proportion, and end up being more widespread and violent than battles between religions.
And, of course, as in "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", differences in unspoken context can complicate communications between men and women every day.
Some of the differences may be honest differences, some may be efforts to subvert or hijack the point, but I suspect many differences are figments of our minds and we are killing each other because we simply don't grasp the power that world-view and perspective and context have to alter the meaning of content.
Any way we can find to educate ourselves and our children in the power of context and how failure to account for it can cause misunderstanding and conflict would seem like something we should focus on and support and include as part of our K-12 education.
And, for passionate atheists like Richard Dawkins, I'd suggest that in understanding why religion is so widespread and powerful, they need to stop looking at the content and discounting this word or that, and look instead at the context, at the frame that religions bring to surround thinking about real-world problems, and evaluate the impact of that frame.
As I quoted Snoopy saying in my last post, effectively, frames change everything. Some things you need to believe to see. If we recast what we see as battles to the death over values into questions of accounting for different frames, most of the causes of or excuses for violence go away.
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