![\"May](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/07\/May_in_Park_City_Utah_4623820881_2.jpg\")
<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I cordially dislike the idea of \u201creligious tolerance.\u201d\u00a0 Not because (as certain of my critics will hasten to declare) I favor religious intolerance<\/em>, but because mere \u201ctolerance\u201d seems too bloodless to me.\u00a0 It suggests that, while I\u2019ll permit differing religious beliefs to exist<\/em>, I do so at the cost of considerable self-restraint, and that I need to hold my nose whenever I take note of faiths or worldviews that differ from the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>.\u00a0 I recall an Evangelical Protestant lady who once told me, quite frankly, that it made her almost physically ill to drive past houses of worship in which the doctrines of the Restoration or any other<\/em> \u201cfalse teachings\u201d were being preached.\u00a0 (She specifically mentioned Catholicism, Judaism, and Hinduism, if I recall correctly, in addition to \u201cMormonism.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I can\u2019t imagine such a reaction.\u00a0 If she was serious, she must be in a state of continual anger and perpetual unhappiness.\u00a0 En route to and from having lunch with my wife and my father-in-law this afternoon, though, I noticed not only a host of Latter-day Saint meeting houses but at least two Protestant churches, two Catholic churches, and a Reformed Jewish synagogue \u2014 and I think that I can confidently and honestly report feeling no surges of anger toward them or their congregants and no waves of indigestion.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I prefer to go beyond mere \u201ctoleration\u201d to mutual appreciation.\u00a0 I\u2019ve long loved (and have long appropriated) Krister Stendahl\u2019s three principles for thinking about other religions and worldviews, including (most relevantly here) his endorsement of what he termed \u201choly envy.\u201d\u00a0 (See, for example, my remarks at the 2011 FAIR conference, which I presented under the title of \u201cMormonism, Islam, and the Question of Other Religions\u201d<\/a> \u2014 and, especially, the talk\u2019s \u201cConclusion.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This coming Tuesday will, barring some totally unforeseen development, be the last class-teaching day of my career as a full-time member of the Brigham Young University faculty.\u00a0 It is a teaching career that has been devoted almost entirely to instruction about non-Latter-day Saint faiths and worldviews, and overwhelmingly to instruction about Arabic and about Islam, Islamic history, Islamic philosophy and theology, and Islamic culture and civilization.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This semester has been pretty typical:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In my MESA 320 class \u2014 MESA<\/em> is Middle East Studies (Arabic)<\/em> \u2014 we\u2019ve read and discussed our way through M. A. S. Abdel Haleem\u2019s Oxford translation of the Qur\u2019an, from beginning to end.\u00a0 The students have also read my little biography of Muhammad<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In my Philosophy 360R\/MESA 467R class, we\u2019ve read Charles Butterworth\u2019s translation of the\u00a0Decisive Treatise and Epistle Dedicatory<\/span><\/em><\/a> of Averro\u00ebs (Ibn Rushd), as well as David Buchman\u2019s English rendering of The Niche of Lights<\/em><\/a> and Michael Marmura\u2019s translation of The\u00a0Incoherence of the Philosophers<\/em><\/a>, both by the great Ab\u016b \u1e24\u0101mid al-Ghaz\u0101l\u012b (died AD 1111).\u00a0 All three books were published in dual-language editions by BYU\u2019s Islamic Translation Series, which it was my honor to conceive and to launch.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In my Islamic Humanities 242 class, we gave special attention to the idea of mosques in general and then to the Ka\u2018ba in Mecca and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in particular.\u00a0 After considering the traditional four-part Islamic garden or (in Persian)\u00a0chaharbagh<\/em> as an earthly image of Paradise, we went on to look at the Grand Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and at Islamic domestic architecture as represented by the \u201cGayer Anderson House\u201d in Cairo and the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.\u00a0 Then we focused on the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, to the south of Cairo, and on the Grand Mosque of Cordoba (in Spain) as an exemplar of Moorish architecture.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n After the midterm examination, we spent some time on the palace complex of the Alhambra, in Grenada, Spain, followed by a discussion of the mosque and university of al-Azhar in Cairo, with more general remarks about the Islamic madrasa<\/em> or \u201ccollege.\u201d\u00a0 We continued that focus with a discussion of the Egyptian Mamluks and of the Mausoleum and Madrasa of Sultan Hasan in Cairo as an example of Mamluk architecture.\u00a0 We then moved to Anatolia or Turkey to examine\u00a0the Sultanahmet or Blue Mosque in Istanbul\u00a0 and the Emperor Justinian\u2019s great nearby Byzantine Church of Hagia Sophia, which served as the prototype for most subsequent Ottoman Turkish mosques.\u00a0 Next, we focused on Mimar Sinan, the most illustrious of all Ottoman Turkish architects, and on two of his greatest buildings, the\u00a0Selemiye in Edirne and the Suleymaniye in Istanbul.\u00a0 From there, we went to the Masjid-e Shah (known since the Revolution, for obvious reasons, as the Masjid-e Imam) as a representative specimen of Safavid Iranian mosque architecture.\u00a0 And, finally, the last building that we studied is the magnificent Taj Mahal of India.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Class sessions on all of these buildings were interspersed among the reading assignments that formed the principal component of the course. We began the class with Ramsay Woods\u2019s retelling of the tales of\u00a0Kalila and Dimna\u00a0<\/em>(Vol 1, \u201cFables of Friendship and Betrayal from the Panchatantra, Jatakas, Bidpai, Kalila and Dimnah and Lights of Canopus\u201d), perhaps the first great work of Arabic prose.\u00a0 Running throughout the course was the reading of Firdawsi\u2019s massive tenth-eleventh-century Shahnameh<\/em>, which has long been regarded as the Persian national epic and which has done much to create the culture and to form the national \u201cpsychology\u201d not only of modern Iran but of populations in Afghanistan and other surrounding territories.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Furthermore, we read and discussed al-Ghaz\u0101l\u012b\u2019s eleventh-century intellectual autobiography\u00a0The Deliverer from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal)<\/em>, in the translation of\u00a0R.J. McCarthy, S.J., as well as\u00a0Hussain Hadawy\u2019s translation of\u00a0Muhsin Mahdi\u2019s edition of the Arabian Nights<\/em>.\u00a0 (Someday, perhaps, I\u2019ll tell the story of my interactions with Professor Mahdi \u2014 which include, among other things, a small but not insignificant victory of BYU over Harvard.)\u00a0 One class session was devoted to Edward Fitzgerald\u2019s great recreation of the Rubaiyat<\/em> (the\u00a0rub\u0101\u02bfiy\u0101t<\/i>\u00a0or \u201cquatrains\u201d) of\u00a0al-Ghaz\u0101l\u012b\u2019s contemporary and possible childhood friend, the astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam.\u00a0 We also read and discussed Afkham Darbandi\u2019s\u00a0 rendering of the\u00a0Conference of the Birds,<\/em> by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystical poet\u00a0Far\u012bd ud-D\u012bn\u00a0\u02bfA\u1e6d\u1e6d\u0101r of Nishapur, as well as\u00a0Rudolf Gelpke\u2019s translation of\u00a0The Story of Layla and Majnun<\/em>, by the twelfth-thirteenth-century poet Ni\u1e93\u0101m\u012b Ganjav\u012b.\u00a0 The latter text can be read as a dysfunctional love story, striking like Shakespeare\u2019s much later play Romeo and Juliet<\/em>.\u00a0 It also makes sense, though, to read it as a Sufi mystical allegory \u2014 which is, in fact, the way I do<\/em> read it.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve lately been accused yet again of narrow-mindedly refusing to recognize any value in religions and religious traditions other than my own.\u00a0 Even if I were to be evaluated solely on my last semester\u2019s teaching, though, I honestly find it difficult to imagine a person of whom such a thing can be said with less justice.\u00a0 Flaws I have in abundance.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not among them.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Posted from Park City, Utah<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 I cordially dislike the idea of \u201creligious tolerance.\u201d\u00a0 Not because (as certain of my critics will hasten to declare) I favor religious intolerance, but because mere \u201ctolerance\u201d seems too bloodless to me.\u00a0 It suggests that, while I\u2019ll permit differing religious beliefs to exist, I do so at the cost of considerable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8675,2091,1739,2247,1152,1149,1809,7245,5703,1947,2019,6969,2737,66,2950,16250,15628,2905,1812,1815,644,788,55,1667,1769,1718,15631,2457,16073],"class_list":["post-90829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-appreciation","tag-arabic-literature","tag-architecture","tag-art","tag-brigham-young-university","tag-byu","tag-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints","tag-inter-religious","tag-interfaith","tag-interfaith-dialogue","tag-interfaith-relations","tag-interreligious","tag-intolerance","tag-islam","tag-islamic","tag-islamicate","tag-krister","tag-latter-day-saint","tag-latter-day-saints","tag-lds","tag-literature","tag-mormon","tag-mormonism","tag-mormons","tag-muslim","tag-muslims","tag-stendahl","tag-tolerance","tag-toleration"],"yoast_head":"\n