Cause and Effect
There is a Mulla Nasrudin story that goes something like this:
Mulla Nasrudin was walking along an alleyway one day when a man feel from a roof and landed on top of him. The other man was unhurt but the Mulla was taken to hospital.
“What teaching do you infer from this event, Master?” one of his disciples asked him.
“Avoid belief in inevitability, even if cause and effect seem inevitable!” said Nasrudin
“Shun theoretical questions like: ‘If a man falls off a roof, will his neck be broken?’ He fell but my neck is broken!”
For a while it seemed to me that Islam had ‘fallen off the roof’ and that in the current 21st century environment a negative view of all matters Islamic was not only unquestioned but actively encouraged. I guess it depends on where you are standing but from certain vantage points it can look that way - however, there is no doubt that the wind is starting to change and that it is the extremists on all sides whose ‘necks are broken’.
The amazing thing is that the new paradigm is emerging not in academia - which by it’s nature has always (one hopes) been resistant to extremist positions, but in the religious traditions themselves. I really believe we are seeing the emergence of a return to the real Islam, the real Christianity - its not that these traditions need reformation (as is often disingenuously claimed in Islam’s case) but more that they need to return to what they originally were intended to be - and before that, people both inside and outside of the religious tradition need to realise what that actually was (or was not).
And that’s what’s happening. From the numerous inter-faith dialogue projects to cpwr, the Council for the Parliament of World Religions to bloggers like Paul Martin, the process is well under-way. I just hope we can be a valid part of it and contribute something worthwhile. It is exactly what is needed now: a movement that isn’t a movement.
It’s an exciting time.
