Our Common Humanity in the Information Age. Principles and Values for Development

DIALOGUE
Karen Armstrong, Author and Historian of Religion
This paper sets out to address the directions that religion is taking in the world today, 
how different religions work together, how they can contribute to peace and how they 
shape identities. I think these are the questions for our world. We are now living in one 
world. We are interdependent economically. What happens in Afghanistan and Iraq today 
will increasingly have repercussions in Washington and London tomorrow. This is an age 
where an immense amount of information is readily available, but you have to have the 
predisposition to interpret what you read on the web. There is a lot of unfortunate stuff on 
the web out there. I had a depressing day yesterday. I appeared on national public radio to 
speak about my new book on Prophet Muhammad and took phone in questions. Every 
single one of them picked out some unpleasant aspect of the Prophet’s life, some of them 
dating back to the medieval period. If you want to find common ground you can find it, if 
you don’t, you won’t. You can easily select the information, the huge amount of 
information that you receive. Dialogue is great, but listening is also important. We are 
often so busy in our very talkative world, speaking to one another but when somebody 
else utters , we are not really listening to what he or she says, but thinking of the next 
clever thing that we are going to say. So dialogue demands that you go into it, not with 
the sense that you have got the answers, but to be ready to learn, to listen and to be 

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Chapter V – Tolerance and Dialogue | 93 
transformed rather than simply to rebut. A lot of the so-called dialogue that is going on in 
the world today is characterized very much by a rather aggressive form of righteousness.
Now religions are supposedly all intolerant. I have lost count of the number of taxi 
drivers, who when I tell them what I do for a living inform me quite categorically that 
religion is responsible for all the world wars of history. Not true! Of course there is bad 
religion. There is strident religion and a lot of strident certainty around at the moment but 
not only in the religious world. At base every single one of the great world religions, in 
one way or another speaks of “concern for everybody”, that you cannot confine your 
benevolence to your own group. That can be just group egotism and it is egotism that 
holds us back from what we call the divine. When you expand your sympathies from 
beyond your own parochial vision then you begin to lose a sense of the prison of 
selfishness.
There is a lot of secular intolerance and there is a lot of secular fundamentalism too. I 
finished off my extremely depressing afternoon by having dinner with a great luminary of 
the American establishment. I am not going to tell you who he or she was and I limped 
away appalled, thinking that there is a kind of disdain for religion, a disdain for things 
Islamic and a sense of superiority.
I was very inspired years ago by reading the words of the late Canadian scholar Wilfred 
Cantwell Smith, former professor of comparative religion at Harvard university. He in the 
mid 50s, before the Suez crisis, wrote an extraordinarily prescient book called Islam and 
the World and he finished that the Muslim world has somehow or other to accept the 
reality of the west. However, the west and the Christian world must also learn to 
recognize that it shares the planet not with inferiors but with equals. In 1955, he said that 
unless both sides learn to appreciate these utter facts of life they will have failed the test 
of the 20
th
century. 9/11 showed that both sides had failed that test. The issue now is 
whether we can redeem ourselves in the 21
st
century which has had such a catastrophic 
beginning.  

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94 | Our Common Humanity in the Information Age