Excerpt: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's "What's Right with Islam"
Imam Rauf discuses Islam's relation with America
— -- The following is an excerpt from "What is Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West" written by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf:
The world wants to like America. The guiding values that Thomas Jefferson articulated so eloquently—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—resonate strongly around the world, transcending countless superficial and cultural differences, not because these are American values, but because they are universal values, embedded in the human heart.
Americans must outgrow the unbecoming arrogance that leads us to assert that America somehow owns a monopoly on goodness and truth—a belief that leads some to view the world as but a stage on which to play out the great historical drama: the United States of America versus the Powers of Evil.
The language of good versus evil is precisely the language of the fundamentalists whose worldview we oppose. Once we define as evil those who counter us, we lose the moral high ground and begin to descend an exceedingly slippery ethical slope. Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves. To battle the evil of others by responding in kind and exhibiting equally violent aggressive behavior is to flout the very ethic of our religious traditions; it is also to violate the Geneva conventions, international law, the United Nations, world opinion, and even our own Bill of Rights. If we truly believe that God is on our side, rather than making sure that we are on God's side, we slip into the illusion that sees no measure as too extreme—a delusion that captivates every extremist heart.
We have two powerful tools with which to bridge the chasm separating the United States from the Muslim world: faith in the basic goodness of humanity and trust in the power of sincerity and dialogue to overcome differences with our fellow human beings. This faith and this trust are taught by all the Abrahamic traditions. They define the Abrahamic ethic, which lies at the core of our American Declaration of Independence, and America needs to rely more heavily on them, as do our fellow actors on the stage of history.
