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T.A. Aquil: Speaking the Language of Peace
Written by Imam Tariq Ansaar Aquil, Sr., President, Muslim American Food Council-Global Halal Founder, Islamic Social Services Foundation, USA
Monday, January 2, 2006
The pursuit of global peace must be without regard to race, religion, culture, academic level, economic level or geography. It must transcend gender, age and any other artificial barriers. This includes anything that has been established as a dialect.
If the language of religious people (Muslim, Christian or Jew) is offensive or out of place when shared with others, whether religious, business, scholarly, political or otherwise, perhaps we need to de-religiousize it. If our language, arguments or conversations are offensive to civil society, and if we cannot speak to every corner of the Earth and share it with kings and the common person, we need to strip away the dialectics and speak to the universal concerns near and dear to all humanity.
We must have the actions that speak to and are consistent with what is good for the environment. The academic, economic and cultural life must benefit, because the goal is universal. We must all benefit.
When we begin to speak the universal language inherent in monotheistic religions and apparent in the scholars’ vocabulary, then we will be living without the dialectics, without the external religiosity that has crept in and is a “no-value added” product. Thus we are removing the outer shell of religiosity and the exclusionary language with its divisive syntax, and we begin the pursuit of peace within our relationship with that which we hold to be greater than ourselves.
[Source: Islamic Perspectives on Peace. Tarrytown, NY: Universal Peace Federation, 2006.]