Journal of Globalization for the Common Good

Our conception of interfaith dialogue that connotes deliberate recognition and sympathetic articulation of the beliefs and practices of other faiths was first adumbrated in poems, aphorisms, and stories in the course of the last seven centuries. True to the fragmentary and disparate fashion in which these early indications have appeared, I will present four historically and culturally specific attempts to account for religious diversity. The authors discussed here were not theologians in the specific sense of the term but believers and practitioners of their faiths, and thinkers in their respective cultural traditions. As they have explored the problem of multiplicity of beliefs and diversity of sacred traditions without intending to convert to other religions, condemn other creeds, or abandon all religion, I designate them as the harbingers of interfaith dialogue long before our contemporaries envisioned a “la point vierge”[1] among diverse spiritual traditions.

TRADITIONAL TREATMENT OF OTHER BELIEVERS AND THE ADVENT OF INTERFAITH DIALOGUE

Every indigenous faith develops a set of perceptions to separate believers from un/believers.[2] We may describe these as “buffer beliefs.” They include: assuming the faithful of other religions inferior, thus unworthy of the truth; ignorant, thus deprived of the truth; conceited, thus resistant to the truth; or vicious, thus impervious to the truth. These perceptions, in their turn, warrant ignoring, converting, debating, or despising other believers. Thus theologies and apologies arise to buttress the religion’s “buffer beliefs.”[3] When believers experience a weakening of these beliefs disillusionment or defection ensue, followed by further diehard attempts to fortify the ramparts.[4] The resulting condition limits communication between religions to territorial or polemical turf battles whose fallout rains on all sides, fostering suspicion of others and doubt of one’s own spiritual heritage.

To escape such a predicament world religions have long sought alternative approaches to interfaith encounters. Mystical traditions of non-Western societies notwithstanding, the Christian theology seems to have been the first to seriously examine the possibility of exploring the beliefs of the adherents of other religions without the intent to convert or to repudiate them. Two early modern theological developments paved the way to the current interfaithdialogue: Friedrich Schleirmacher’s statement that God is available, to some degree, in all religions, but that Christianity is nevertheless superior to all has led to what is today known as “Inclusivism.” Ernst Troeltch’s view that a culture’s religious claim can only be viewed as its peculiar apprehension of the divine has ushered in the modern “Pluralism.”[5] The twentieth century, in which such tolerance of spiritual diversity was first articulated witnessed the triumph of intellectual curiosity and spiritual empathy over the age old quest of exclusive spiritual privilege.[6] Rather than focusing on the sophisticated contemporary models of interfaith dialogue, this essay will explore simpler ideas that foreshadowed the contemporary dialogue of faiths.[7]

Futile quarrels between naïve adherents of competing religions can have an edifying effect on the astute observer. It calls into question all manifestations of parochial faiths, shattering a significant barrier to interfaith dialogue.

Saadi, (1213-1291 AD) an Iranian judge, court advisor, and world traveler may have been the first to adopt a posture of “ironic detachment” toward the problem of interfaith dialogue. By exposing the folly of dogmatic defiance of one’s opponent Saadi points to an alternative path toward interfaith dialogue.7 In Golestan, a seamless juxtaposition of witticisms, maxims, and admonitions set both in verse and ornamental prose, Saadi relates a parable (Hekayat) that bears the following title: “Everyone fancies himself the most knowledgeable and his children the most adorable”. The story is set in three couplets:

Saadi’s mystical counterpart, Hafez (1325-1389) who loathed hypocritical and superficial fanaticism in faith, described the endless intra-religious contests in similar terms, that is, as a false and futile exercise:

This approach seems to suggest that in religious bickering both sides are misguided, indeed, ludicrous. Hence its adherents advise against direct and accusatory engagement with one’s religious counterparts. It is noteworthy that Saadi, while securely anchored within his own religious beliefs and practices, exposes the absurdity of condemning other beliefs and practices. The refusal to engage in polemical and partisan debate paves the way for a genuine interfaith dialogue.

Three centuries after Saadi, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) voiced a similar reservation about the capricious nature of traditional beliefs and practices. In view of such arbitrariness, he advocated cultural and religious tolerance.^{^[10]} Later, Descartes and Pascal echoed Montaign’s doubts.^{^[11]} A number of reformation and renaissance European thinkers used various literary devices to articulate their ironic detachment from the prevalent Western ethnocentrism. Thomas More (1516), Tomasso Campanella, (1623) and Charles Montesquieu’s (1721) invoked fictional communities or exotic outsiders to underscore the human virtues of the non Westerners or, alternatively, the human failings of the Western societies.^{^[12]} Voltaire, in particular, argued at one point that it was folly, not wisdom that was shared by all nations.^{^[13]}

The plain acceptance of the spiritual authenticity of the religious “other”, repugnant to most traditional religious doctrines as it is, emerges from prolonged interfaith contact. Such acceptance is simple and intuitive and, as such, it circumvents theological arguments against the possibility of salvation for the adherents of other religions.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), the unsurpassed novelist of the pastoral America whose literary achievements has been acknowledged by his contemporaries and successors alike^{^[14]} suggests pragmatic acceptance as a path of interfaith understanding: Natty Bumpo (Hawk-eye) and Chingachgook (Indian John), heroes of his “Leatherstocking Tales” are “inner directed”^{^[15]} strong men, imbued with their respective pioneer European, and East coast Native American cultures. But they lead lives of fierce independence and deep solitude away from their natal environments. We meet them in five novels written between 1826 and 1849^{^[16]} as they grow old together and share numerous adventures. In the meantime, they come to respect and trust each other to such an extent that they shed prejudices of their native cultures about each other. How could either one of them sincerely believe that the other, despite all his compassion, courage, and honesty will be condemned to eternal damnation due to his “false” religion?^{^[17]} So, Natty, a usually reticent character, utters an ecumenical hope that rises above the doctrinal religious differences and embraces the fellowship of men of conscience and good will. In the following passage Natty Bumpo bids farewell to Uncas, Indian John’s son:

I loved both you and your father Uncas, though our skins are not altogether of a color, and our gifts are somewhat different. Tell the Sagamore I never lost sight of him in my greatest trouble; and, as for you, think of me sometimes when on a lucky trail; and depend on it, boy, whether there be one heaven or two, there is a path in the other world by which honest men may come together again” [18]

Thus Natty, whom James Fenimore Cooper has characterized as the “American Adam”^{^[19]}, articulates an authentic maxim of the American immigrant experience: Pragmatic acceptance despite the apparent incommensurability of beliefs.

It should be borne in mind that Cooper’s praise for the East coast Indians went beyond a merely romantic glance at a brutalized and disappearing culture. Cooper’s contemporary Charles Henry Dana echoed Cooper’s sentiments. Indeed, there is a curious parallel between Dana’s real life friendship with Hope, the Sandwich Islander and Natty’s imagined friendship with Chigachgook:

I would have trusted my life and my fortune in the hands of any one of these people; and certainly had I wished for a favor or act of sacrifice, I would have gone to them all, in turn, before I should have applied to one of my own countryman (p. 144-5)

It is with deep pathos, then, that Dana, himself a practicing Christian,[20] recounts, in words reminiscent of Cooper’s Natty Bumpo, the tragedy of Sandwich Islanders:

They seem a doomed people. The curse of a people calling themselves Christian, seems to follow them everywhere; and even there, in this obscure place [California of 1835 was a remote Mexican territory] lay two young islanders, whom I had left strong, active youngmen, in the vigor of health, wasting away under a disease, which they would never have known but for their intercourse with Christianized Mexico and people from Christian America (p. 242)

The curious consonance of Cooper’s novels and Dana’s memoirs corroborates the authenticity of the American emerging attitude toward intercultural and interfaith dialogue. Seen from a strict logical vantage point, the above two approaches offer no theoretical solution for the apparent mutual exclusion of faiths according to the dogma of traditional religions, but they are intuitively appealing and pragmatically viable.

Numerous mystical analogies account for the apparent incompatibility of faiths. A typical example is that different religious traditions are on the circumference of a circle. Each gazes at the unchanging Truth at the center, yet differs from others because of its unique perspective.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) suggests one of the most intriguing variations on this theme in Anna Karenina. The analogy comes as an epiphany to Constantine Levin. There is no doubt that Levin’s discoveries and reveries are those of his creator. Not only are Tolstoy and Levin from the same social class, and share the same preoccupations with theology, agricultural science, land ownership, and peasant education; they read the same books and exhibit the same idiosyncratic traits.[21] Therefore, Levin’s life-long struggle with faith, doubt, agnosticism, and atheism parallels Tolstoy’s own account in his other religious writings.[22]

The fascinating analogy occurs to Levin in a sudden flash of illumination, although he has long prepared for it.[23] The vision enables Levin to reconcile the absolute universality of faith with the historical particularity of his religion. Further, he finds a way to acknowledge the truth claims of other faiths while holding fast to his own beliefs. Indeed, it is the comparison of Christianity to religions such as Buddhism and Islam“ who also teach and do good” (pp. 684-5) that brings forth his epiphany.[24]

Levin contemplates the enigma of diversity of faiths while sitting in his dusky room and gazing at the momentary flashes of a receding storm that obscure the majesty of the dark empty sky with its eternal constellations, the Milky Way, prominently streaking it. Suddenly a beguiling analogy occurs to him: just as the astronomers use the illusion of the stability of the earth to chart the movement of heavenly bodies, knowing, all along, that the earth, too, is a moving object, so the believers can reconcile themselves to the illusion of the centrality and solidity of their beliefs against the apparent flux of other faiths. The truths are relative compared to each other, yet they are all parts of a universal and eternal constellation of realities beyond the reach and spiritual needs of the particular believer.[25]

Thus a model of inter-faith dialogue is proposed that sacrifices neither the universality of the truth, nor the particularity of beliefs and rituals that aim to capture and consecrate it within specific cultural traditions. This approach, despite its aesthetic plausibility, rarely goes beyond analogical reasoning. As such, it echoes the weaknesses of the previous two models: intuitive awareness of the authenticity of multiple faiths rarely engages the exclusive theological claims of particular faiths.

The boldest pre-modern approach to interfaith dialogue is the one that proposes all religions are divinely inspired and that, by divine decree, they are destined to worship in their own sacred idiom. The divine presence looks beyond outer trappings of beliefs and rituals and heeds each praise and prayer with infinite compassion.

Rumi, (1207-1273 AD), one of the most celebrated Islamic mystics, proposes the boldest pre-modern model of interfaith dialogue. He believes that the diversity of faiths is a result of human limited horizons and illusions. However, God understands and embraces this diversity, regardless of which religion is closer to a true understanding of divinity. Rumi has proposed this idea in a number of places in his Mathnavi and Divan e Shams. But perhaps the most readily accessible and detailed treatment of the subject appears in a parable, obviously an apocryphal one, of an encounter between Moses and an illiterate shepherd. As Moses approaches the shepherd’s hut he overhears him praying to God, imploring him to come out of hiding, so he can feed him with the milk of his best sheep, comb his hair, fix his bed, massage his feet, and mend his shoes. Moses is furious at what he perceives as unmitigated blasphemy:

He wanders off chastened and utterly vanquished by Moses’s unrelenting verdict. But the story does not end here:

But ironically, the shepherd is not able to recapture his naivete. Moses’s rebuke has elevated his spirit to new heights:

The theme of the unimportance of apparent religious differences against the backdrop of the ultimate unity of spiritual paths is central to Islamic mysticism. Farid ud Din Attar (1142-1220), one of Rumi’s sources of inspiration, allegorically articulated this belief in his famous “Conference of the Birds”.[27]

Mosleh ol-Din Saadi and James Fenimore Cooper’s practical solutions, to abandon hostile polemics and religious finger-pointing; and to trust one’s intuition that people of sincere intentions and virtuous deeds cannot be doomed due to the particular ways of their worship; and Leo Tolstoy and Jalal al Din Rumi’s ambitious projects of reconciling the universality of the religious truth with the particular forms of belief and practice remain fresh and instructive despite the centuries separating them from each other and from us.

Although I have, hitherto, avoided comparing early pioneers of interfaith dialogue with their modern counterparts, I find the forerunners’ models instructive. In my opinion, the insights of Saadi and Cooper may be identified as “Pluralist,” whereas the ideas of Rumi and Tolstoy could be characterized as “Inclusivist.” Their interfaith models may be further differentiated according to their respective levels of propositional strength. The resulting typology reveals four models of interfaith dialogue proposed by the authors discussed in this essay:

The affinity of the four premonitions of interfaith dialogue with modern categories of Pluralism and Inclusivism

The above forerunners of interfaith dialogue either lived lives of spiritual exploration or witnessed colossal historical transformations in their life time. Saadi was a world traveler; Rumi had converted from a legalistic to a mystical faith; Cooper lived at the epicenter of the immigrant experience and witnessed the gradual disappearance of the east coast Native American cultures; and Tolstoy, the cosmopolitan aristocrat, stood at the threshold of the historic transformation of Russia from an isolated Feudal country into a modern complex society.[28] All four emerged from their experiences with a profound reflexivity about their indigenous ways of life and belief.

These premonitions of interfaith dialogue encourage us to forge ahead, assured of the long precedence of the quest for understanding, tolerance and acceptance among world religions. The main thrust of Interfaith dialogue, respect of spirituality in its manifold manifestations, is no longer a rare insight of the sages of the yore but a common belief of our contemporaries and, hopefully, a necessary component of future culture of humankind.

A few weeks ago while parking in front of my favorite coffee shop, I noticed the bumper sticker on the car parked in front of me. It read:

This invitation to ecumenism, in bold dancing fonts, reminded me of the long odyssey of the ideas of tolerance, inclusivism, pluralism, and interfaith understanding; I reveled at how far we have come on the path of recognizing both the utter universality and the unique singularity of our spiritual experiences.

And then, September 11 blackened the horizon. Now, the shadow of the “clash of civilizations”[29] blots out the penumbra of hope in the aftermath of the carnage. And it is no longer only the lunatic fringe that dares claim a monopoly of inclusive human values. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister recently pontificated: “We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being and respect for human rights – in contrast with Islamic countries.” (Newsweek, October 8, 2001). May be the main argument of this paper, the universality of quest for interfaith understanding, would be received with a renewed sense of urgency in view of the darkening prospects of inter-cultural understanding. .

ENDNOTES

[1] A phrase coined by the Great Orientalist Luis Massignon and adopted by the visionary Christian monk and pioneer of interfaith dialogue, Thomas Merton. (Merton and Sufism, p. 52)

[2] Sociologist Robert. K Merton (1968, pp 347-351) makes a useful typological distinction between non-members and ex-members. The former include those whose beliefs are considered completely divergent from the group. The latter, on the other hand, believe in a slightly different version of the group’s beliefs. Logically, one would expect that the remote non-members would encounter harsher treatment than neighboring ex-members, but sociologically the converse holds. Non-members are neglected as they pose no threat to the group’s beliefs and practices while ex-members are suspected and persecuted relentlessly. In this context, I propose that the naive believer sees other believers as ex-members and feels threatened by them. Hence the cultivation of “buffer beliefs.”

[3] Evolutionary biologists such as David Sloan Wilson have argued that such rules of bad behavior toward out-group developed at the dawn of the hunting-gathering society tens of thousands of years ago and were beneficial to those early human gatherings. As societies developed, though, the disadvantages of denigrating other people’s religion started to out-weigh the advantages. (See: “Darwin’s Cathedral”)

[4] The following are the frequent strategies for keeping religious belief untainted by doubt.

BUNKER OF RECTITUDE (Exclusivism)

This attitude, typical of the so called “fundamentalist” orientation in a number of world religions, posits an unequivocal, unquestioning, literal belief in the correctness of a religion to the exclusion of all others. It engages either in aggressive conversion of the “infidels” or else, isolates itself, certain of the eventual divine vindication.

RIPPLES OF GRACE: (Inclusivism)

The people who find themselves in a particular (and by definition “right”) religion must believe that they are elected either by the inscrutable divine “grace”, or by the virtue of their “works” to be in the right. The religious knowledge thus received is regarded as direct, authentic and intimate. The people of God are, thus, closest to his intentions and institutions. What of others? They are not elected for membership in this “aristocracy of grace” but be righteous according to their station. The Strongest form of this attitude is found among the Jewish and Hindu believers. A weak and conciliatory form of it was adopted in Catholicism (after Vatican II) fostering tolerance of other beliefs. People outside the religion are accorded a place beneath the people of the faith; yet they are tolerated as less realized but capable of virtuous lives.

CITY OF DIVERSITY (Pluralism)

This situation, typical of traditional mystic orders and contemporary liberal traditions, admits religious differences, continues to adhere to a particular religious tradition, but envisions higher possibilities of reconciliation, where all religions will come to realize their true and compatible nature. In the meantime, pure tolerance and appreciation of the diverse faiths remains the watchword of pluralism.

[5] William James’ belief that people’s religious experiences are authentic regardless of their religious tradition was another important early contribution to the post enlightenment pluralist theology.

These discussions, despite their remarkable influence on the mainstream of Christianity, e.g., the positions declared by Vatican II and the World Council of Churches, have instigated a neo-orthodox response known as “Exlusivism,” (also called as Particularism, or Restrictivism). See: editors’ introduction to Okholm and Phillips (ed), Four View on Salvation in a Pluralistic World. Pp. 7-12.

[6] This modest achievement is a result of a great struggle. If the challenge of intercultural understanding, as Clifford Geertz (1983) has suggested, is “understanding understandings not our own,” then interfaith understanding poses an even greater challenge because it requires not only cognitive understanding, but moral comparison and ritual sensibility. Part of the difficulty is that traditionally, believers have taken a defensive posture toward knowledge emanating from other believers, and a dim view of the patronizing empathy of the agnostics. It has been a jealous, “all or nothing,” sphere of experience. How, then, do believers understand, appreciate, and learn from truths germane to other religions without diminishing and betraying his or her own? This is the task set for the contemporary interfaith dialogue. John Azumah, has designated five “stumbling blocks” in the path of interfaith dialogue (Azumah). Substantive problems notwithstanding, one may learn from the example of the contemporary explorers of world religions such as Paul Tillich, Louis Massignon, Thomas Merton, Mahatma Gandhi, and more recently, Henry Corbin, John Hicks, Fazlur Rahman, and Houston Smith who have remained within their own respective religious traditions and have, indeed, claimed that understanding “other” religious precepts has deepened their understanding and appreciation of their own religion. Today, more than ever there is a need for not only interfaith but intra-faith dialogue. The difficult rapprochement between Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholic communities in the latter part of the 20^th century illustrated the hopes of reconciliation as well as the dangers of mutual alienation. (Perica).

[7] Of the four approaches presented heretwo are Eastern and decidedly pre-modern. The other two belong to the Western and early modern era. There is, I will argue, a correspondence between the Eastern and Western approaches. Saadi and Cooper propose a practical, common-sense approach; while Rumi and Tolstoy seek a deeper spiritual solution. Therefore, instead of a conventional grouping of the two 13^th century Eastern poet-philosophers and the two 19^th century Western novelists together, I have interspersed them based on the affinity of the irrespective views. This, despite the fact that the Western authors discussed in this essay are under the influence of similar literary traditions. Georg Lukacs has argued that Tolstoy and Cooper both represent the genre of “Historical Novel” pioneered by Sir Walter Scott. Their depiction of the past, while fictional in particular details, render an authentic account of the historical era they describe.

[8] Sheikh Mosleh od Din Sa’di of Shiraz, Golestan (Rose Garden) The Book of “Adab e Sohbat” (the Manners of Companionship.)

[9] Mohammad Shams od Din Hafez of Shiraz, Divan e Ghazalliat (Compendium of poetry), Ghazal (sonet) 184. The number 72 in this poem is a reference to a saying attributed to the Prophet of Islam in which he prophesied as many as seventy two eventual sectarian interpretations of Islam.

[10] In his essay: “Of Costume” Montaigne stated:“I do believe, that no so absurd or ridiculous fancy can enter into human imagination, that does not meet with some example of public practice, and that, consequently, our reason does not ground and back up.” In example after example, Montaigne demonstrated that every nation assumes its cultural ways of life and belief as natural and those of the others as deviant or defective. Montaigne’s view of religion was that it was: “beyond the reach of human reason.” therefore: “any error is more excusable in such as are not endowed, through the divine bounty, with an extraordinary illumination from above.” It is conceivable that the ravages of the bloody thirty year “Wars of Religion” (562-1598) persuaded Montaigne to be more lenient toward those with “besotted” religious sensibilities.

Montaigne’s illustrious Spanish contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) who made no secret of his animosity toward Moorish beliefs and culture, nevertheless praised the wisdom of the fictional compiler of Don Quixote’s chronicles “Cid Hamet the Muhametan philosopher,” who had, according to Cervantes, acquired his wisdom “by the light of nature alone without the light of faith.” (Part II, ch. 53)

[11] Descartes, (1596-1650) in his Discourse on Method, demonstrates his distrust of custom: “It is good to know something of the customs of different people in order to judge more sanely of our own, and not to think that everything of a fashion not ours is absurd and contrary to reason, as do those who have seen nothing.” Blaise Pascal, (1632-1662) expresses similar doubts in his discours sur les passions de l’amour: “Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. . . it is custom that makes so many men Christians, custom that makes them Turks, heathens, artisans, soldiers, etc.” (Quoted in Slotnis, ibid, p. 120)

[12] More conjures up a society of frugality, humane sentiments, and hard work in his Utopia. Companella, likewise, invokes a society free of greed and appreciative of work in The City of the Sun. Montesquieu employs the incredulous gaze of Uzbek and Rica, authors of Persian letters to underscore both virtues and absurdities in the traditional beliefs and values of the East and the West. Montesquieu’s, Persian Letters has been criticized as a product of European “Orientalism”, and rightfully so. Nevertheless, its self-critical properties distinguish it from the mainstream fictional accounts of exotic swashbuckling Orientals such as those invoked in James Morier’s Hajji Baba of Ispahan.

[13]According to Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary hatred of “Reason” infects orthodox religious leaders from the Sultan of Constantinople to the Bishop of Rome.

The above examples notwithstanding, cognitive generosity toward other cultures remained sporadic throughout these centuries. Cross cultural empathy was reserved only for those who submitted to religious conversion and cultural assimilation; a fate illustrated in the transformation of “Friday” from a savage to a Christian in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In absence of such a conversion, even the admittedly virtuous unbelievers are relegated to eternal damnation. We find them confined in Dante’s Inferno for being born before Christ. Of particular poignancy is the fate of Mohammad and Ali, the prophet of Islam and his successor, who are depicted eternally slit by one great stroke upward from chin to crest:

“All these whom thou beholdest in the pit,

Were Sowers of scandal, sowers of schism abroad,

While they yet lived; therefore they now go slit.”

[14] Of course, reviews have not been all adulatory: Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain both denounced the prevailing academic and literary adulation of Cooper’s works. The early twentieth century witnessed a renaissance of Cooper studies of which D.H. Lawrence’s insightful remarks in his pithy Studies in Classical American Literature is a good example. Georg Lukacs, the prominent Hungarian literary critic and social philosopher in his Historical Novel found Cooper’s depiction of the moral and physical destruction of the gentile society of Indians by colonial capitalism of France and England, worthy of comparison with Sir Walter Scott’s description of the medieval Europe and Tolstoy’s invocation of the fading of the feudal Russia in the wake of the Napoleonic invasion. All three authors, Lukacs argues, belong to a literary genre that he calls “historical novel.” They reflect the social reality accurately. The narrative is fictional but the historical imagination is authentic. A flurry of scholarly treatments of Cooper in the last quarter of the twentieth century has revealed the hitherto unexplored dimensions of his work: J.P.M. Williams’s Political Justice in Republic, Daniel Peck’s A World By Itself, Wayne Franklin’s The New World of James Fenimore Cooper, and Stephen Railton’s James Fenimore Cooper, A Study of His Life and Imagination explore, respectively, the political, phenomenological, aesthetic, and socio-psychological aspects of Cooper’s work with exemplary clarity and perception. Cooper’s “The Last of Mohicans” was made into a major Hollywood movie in 1992.

[15] Here I am using the term “Inner directed” in contrast to “Other directed”, a dichotomy used in David Reisman’s classical The Lonely Crowd (1950).

[16] The five volumes include: The Last of Mohicans, (1826), Prairie (1827), Pioneers ( 1831), Pathfinder (1840), Deerslayer, (1841)

[17] Actually, Chingachgook, had converted to Christianity, but Cooper elucidates, in great amusing detail, how little the new faith had impacted his spiritual approach toward the world, and how deeply and totally steeped in his Native American beliefs he had been all along.

[18] James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, 1827, 1980, New York, Signet Classics, p. 373.

[19] James Fenimore Cooper, Pathfinder, 1840

[20] Charles Dana’s faith is in evidence throughout his travelogue. His regret that the captain of his first vessel: “Pilgrim”, would neither observe nor respect the Sabbath; his horror at the Captain’s taunting of a flogged sailor when he invoked the name of the Lord, and his attendance of various churches in San Francisco prove his religiosity. Still, he was a man of conscience. He recognized the moral attributes of non Christian Kanakas and chastised the people of his own faith for denigrating such noble and generous people.

[21] We learn from the book, that Levin periodically immerses himself in the works of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Spencer. These are the books that Tolstoy himself studied. Also, certain actions of Constantine Levin are modeled after Tolstoy. For example, Levin lends his diaries, detailing his reckless youthful exploits to his fiancé, Kitty, as a way to atone for his sins and to be honest with his wife. Tolstoy did the same thing with his prospective wife Sonia. Similarly, in a period of despair, Levin keeps a rope nearby in case he decides to end his life. Tolstoy reports the same about a period of despair in his own life.

[22] The theme of spiritual quest permeates Tolstoy’s major literary works. The spiritual/practical division of labor between Nikolai Rostov and his wife Mary in War and Peace is reflected in the relationship between Constantine Levin and his wife Kitty in Anna Karenina. The spiritual quest of Pierre in War and Peace too, leads him to an awakening similar to that of Constantine in Anna Karenina. Here, the mutterings of an illiterate captive soldier proves illuminating to Pierre (book four, chapter 12). There are further similarities and parallels: The question concerning the meaning of death reverberates not only in the events surrounding the death of Levin’s older brother in Anna Karenina, but also in Prince Andre’s agonizing journey toward death and in Pierre’s witnessing of the execution of Russian prisoners of war in War and Peace. Tolstoy’s most detailed meditation on the subject unfolds in The Death of Ivan Illich.

[23] It was in his mind, in his heart, in his soul, suckling it with his mother’s milk. Learning this truth was not so much a discovery as a remembrance. The “truth” revealed to Levin is an “either/or” proposition. You either live for your stomach or for you your soul. This Levin learns from a humble peasant commenting on his coworkers’ respective virtues and vices.

[24] F. A Flowers III, in his preface to Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief states that Tolstoy undertook “an in-depth study of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity” (p. 8) in his search for true spirituality.

[25] The world-view of Abba, the protagonist of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Little Shoemaker” reflects a variation on the theme of Tolstoy’s tolerant perspectivism. Abba is a 19^th century rural artisan with strong traditional beliefs:

“ He knew that the wide world was full of strange cities and distant lands, that Frampol was actually no bigger than a dot in a small prayer book; but it seemed to him that his little town was the navel of the universe and that his own house stood at the very center. He often thought that when the Messiah came to lead the Jews to the Land of Israel, he, Abba, would stay behind in Frampol, in his house, on his own hill. Only on the Sabbath and on holey days would he step into a cloud and let himself be flown to Jerusalem.”

[26] Rumi, Mathnavi, Book II, verses 1727, 1729, 1731, 1748, 1736, 1750-51, 1759, 1757, 1753, 1766-67, 1762, 1777, 1783, 1784-86, 1787-90, 1791.

[27] In his famous Conference of the Birds, Attar tells the tale of a thousand birds who decided to take a long journey to meet the mystical king of birds named: “Threeten bird” (“Simorgh”) who was said to live at the summit of the legendary Mount Ghaf. Of all the birds that embarked upon the pilgrimage only thirty birds had the purity of heart and perseverance to complete the journey. But once upon the summit found no trace of the majestic “Threeten bird”:

“Once those thirty birds looked around themselves,

Behold: “Threeten bird” was one and the same as those thirty birds.”

“They saw themselves as the “threeten” the marvelous bird.

Threeten bird” was none other than thirty congregated Birds!”

[28] We can trace similar backgrounds among contemporary advocates of interfaith dialogue: the sojourns of Thomas Merton are legendary. John Hick attributes his conversion from exclusivist evangelical Christianity into a pluralist advocacy of a religious “Copernican Revolution”, to his association with members of Islamic, Buddhist, Sikh, and Hindu religions in Birmingham. In their homes and places of worship he realized “something that is obvious enough once noticed:” That is, “different faith communities see and respond to different ‘faces’ of the infinite transcendent Reality” (Okholm and Phillips, pp.13, 38, 91). We may conclude that such intercultural empathetic intuitions that are frequent in our age have also been available, on rare occasions, for our predecessors.

^{^[28]} The term was first coined by the Orientalist Bernard Lewis. It was then popularized by the political scientist Samuel Huntington in the 1990s.

References:

-- Azumah, John, “The Integrity of Interfaith Dialogue” in: Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2002.

– Attar, Farid ud-Din. The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq Ut-Tair), Trans by S. C. Nott. 1954. The Janus Press, London.

– Mantiq Ut-Tair, 1994. Peik e Farhang Publishers, Tehran.

– Bahr, Ehruard and Goldschmidt, Ruth, Georg Lukacs, 1979, Ungar, New York.

– Berger, Peter, the Sacred Canopy; Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, 1967. Doubleday, Garden City, NY.

– A Rumor of Angels; Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural, 1969. Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y.

– Campanella, Tomasso, City of the Sun, tr. T.W. Halliday, quoted in: Readings in Early Anthropology, Slotkin, (ed), 1965. Aldine, Chicago.

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