On most days, if we’re realistic, the idea of religious tolerance serves only to usher a person just inside the other’s front door. It might provide a sort-of, kind-of knowledge, but it still leaves something to be desired in the hungry or thirsty spirit.
For this reason, Dr. AbdulRahman al-Salimi decided to re-name his academic journal.
In the modern and still modernizing Sultanate of Oman, the al-Salimi name is a venerable religious brand. Nur al-Din al-Salimi (d. 1914) was a distinguished Muslim scholar in the Ibadi tradition, the prevailing
expression of Islam in Oman. The current Minister of Awqaf and Religious Affairs is His Excellency Sheikh Abdullah al-Salimi. And the minister’s nephew, AbdulRahman, whom I met in Muscat in January, serves as editor of the influential Al Tafahom (“Understanding”).
Nathan Elmore in the Wahiba Sands desert region of northeast Oman.
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In his office at the ministry, AbdulRahman explained warmly and assuredly that the journal’s former
name, Al Tasamoh (“Tolerance”), did not take interreligious dialogue or interfaith education far enough. Or close enough, from his perspective. With tolerance, he said, “There is still a distance.” With understanding — here he leaned in to pour me yet another cup of Omani coffee — we come closer.
Only two days earlier, on my journey from Frankfurt to Muscat, I landed in Riyadh on Dec. 31. As the plane touched down, a beautiful, serene hint of dusk appeared in the partial vision of the plane’s windows. It was — indeed — the last evening of the year, according to the Western calendar, and the last evening this American evangelical could say: I have not come close enough to the Arab world.
This Arabian moment marked a first trip for me to the Peninsula — into the cradle of Islam, which, it is said, the Kings of Oman accepted peacefully in 629. With the blessing of Virginia Baptists, I was embarking on a two-week travel seminar through Hartford Seminary’s partnership with Al Amana Centre, a Christian ecumenical center in Muscat fostering interfaith education and understanding between Christians and Muslims.
Tolerance is, almost by a perceived divine right, an ideological flashpoint for some Christians along the cultural landscape where I work — Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va. A stunningly diverse university, with over 32,000 students representing over 100 nationalities, it is true: it can be deemed an unforgivable sin to sound, or to smell, even the slightest bit intolerant. I imagine many Baptists eschew the term “tolerance” as deriving from, at best, an imposed liberalism surfacing as political correctness, or, at worst, an outright devilish scheme automatically opposing Jesus Christ himself.
While I don’t always share my religious clansmen’s edginess about the word or ideology, I do share AbdulRahman’s emboldened pragmatism, a much-observed Ibadi characteristic. As it is presented and often prescribed, tolerance lacks a real potency or sustained capacity to relieve some of the greatest human distances. For all its bluster and buzz, it cannot seemingly get us on the inside — where understanding arrives alongside knowledge via proximity.
On one highly memorable day during this Oman adventure, proximity beckoned in a unique way. In the morning it came in the form of a guided tour of Sur Al-Lawatia, the historic walled Shia quarter in Mutrah near old Muscat; in the evening it showed at a wedding near Samail.
In Mutrah we walked leisurely through the Shia community tucked behind Al-Rasul Al-Aadam Mosque. The somberness was striking and palpable: Shias were marking the liturgical days of mourning for Husayn’s martyrdom in 680. A large, black drape was hung over the backside of the mosque, symbolizing the cascading mood. Small sections of cloth representing individual prayers for healing were tied to a pole, which asserted itself at one intersection of the maze-like neighborhood. And the shoes of elderly women rested in the walkway outside a husayniyah, a small room unable to contain the chanted laments.
Near Samail, in contrast, the joy was irrepressible. As guests of a friend of the groom, we were in someone else’s grand celebration — which turned out to be an outdoor multi-family wedding in which several different grooms were engaging the traditional religious and cultural rites.
In a typical Omani village in the interior, the sunset came and went as we waited in a receiving line with approximately 200 Arab men. We shook hands with the grooms and offered our blessings in broken Arabic. We observed the proper protocol where each groom receives a set of terms from his bride (mediated by officiates). We ate with our hands as we sat in small groups on the covered ground, encircling a platter of beef and rice.
Later, we accepted the intimate hospitality of an exuberant father: fruits, halwa and coffee, out on his
terrace and under the moon.
Eboo Patel, who directs the Interfaith Youth Core based in Chicago, dreams of a world where interfaith cooperation is the norm. He envisions the leadership of faith communities moving us beyond fear, ignorance and a plethora of other barriers. In his book Acts of Faith he champions “a deep religious pluralism” — “neither mere coexistence nor forced consensus” — that embraces differences even as we attempt to achieve a common life.
In part, of course, in Oman it was exactly these experiences-in-difference, in Mutrah and Samail, which, for this Christian and Baptist, has much to do with dreaming, envisioning, championing and achieving a common life. As Doug Leonard, the director of Al Amana Centre, says, “Experiential and relational interfaith education is what it will take to transform people’s understanding of the other.”
In the imagination of AbdulRahman: with understanding, we come closer. Anything less, we might as well call it tolerance from a distance.
Naturally I’m still processing what is, in the end, only one example of a predominantly Arab Muslim country. For now, I appreciate the incisive questions of Dr. Steve Garber from The Washington Institute, who commonly asks Christians: “Do we love the world enough to know it, and do we know the world enough to love it?”
The fourth-century Christian scholar Ambrosiaster presses the provocation even further when applied to Christians and Muslims alike: “Only when a person has love can he be said to know as he ought to know.” And somewhere inside that kind of knowledge must be — surely — a better and richer and closer understanding.
Nathan F. Elmore is Baptist collegiate minister at Virginia Commonwealth University and is working toward a master’s degree in Islamic studies and Christian-Muslim relations. He writes at www.nathanfelmore.com.