“In any conflict, reconciliation becomes possible when the antagonists cease dehumanizing each other and begin instead to see a bit of themselves in their enemy.”
- Madeleine Albright, The Mighty & The Almighty

For centuries, from tribe to successor tribe and from generation to next generation, the world has reached for peace ……only to find (instead) persecution, and prosecution.  Ethnic biases (including intolerance and prejudice), ignorance, arrogance, and uncompromising (and unforgiving) racial attitudes have all helped fuel conflict, hatred, and war between religious traditions on all continents. 

From Jewish slavery in Egypt to the Babylonian Exile … the martyring of Christians throughout the Roman Empire….the Crusades…..the Inquisition ……the Shoah (Nazi genocide of the Jews):  a path of violence and death marks the lives of  Muslims, Christians, and Jews ….. generations of persecuted people struggling to raise families and live in peace.

Rooted in fear, suspicion, and misunderstanding, our human history – specifically, the history of interfaith dialogue, tolerance and mutual respect (and acceptance) – is a minefield of disappointments.

“During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while European scholars were sitting at the feet of Muslim scholars in Spain, the European Crusaders were slaughtering Muslims in Palestine and Syria.  There was, at this formative period of Western civilization, an unhealthy imbalance.  In their efforts to build a new identity, Western Christians saw Jews and Muslims, the two victims of the Crusades, as a foil, a symbol of everything that they believed they were not (or feared that they were).  They tended to project buried anxieties about their own behavior onto these two ‘enemies of civilization.’ 

Thus it was during the Crusades that scholar-monks of Europe stigmatized Islam as the religion of the sword, even though Christians themselves had instigated brutal holy wars against Muslims in the Middle East.  During the Crusades, hatred of Jews became a chronic disease in Europe, and this shameful tradition led to some of the worst crimes of Western history.  But our Islamophobia is equally ingrained, and the cruel atrocities of September 11 have confirmed many in the old crusading prejudices.’
- Karen Armstrong, as written in the Forward to What’s Right With Islam,
(Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, author)

Is hope for the future any less (or more?) optimistic? Certainly, our human condition can (and should) do better than the tragic examples of the past.  Or can we, really?