Having to choose between the ivory tower and the real world, I realized, is an extremely difficult decision—not least when many of the factors affecting this choice are beyond one’s control. While I continue to bother my mind with all that boggles it, I thought I would share with the world the following reflections that I had to write down sometime ago in response to a question:
At the conclusion of a conference on Islamic hermeneutics at Yale last year, Farid Esack posed a rather blunt question to the speakers of a discussion panel that he was moderating: he asked, what do any of their presentations, their sophisticated treatments of issues in law, theology, and scriptural interpretation, have anything to do with the suffering of human beings out there in society? How do their works relate to the millions of AIDS victims in Africa, or the countless millions of poor and starving people across the world? Esack, of course, was not making an accusation. He was rather, in a characteristic manner of provocation, inviting his audience to re-think the un-thought. For an aspiring scholar of religious history, these questions are indeed deeply unsettling. (more…)
A few months ago, I was witness to an ugly debate on the pages of a local newspaper, the Boston Metro. For nearly a week, each morning in the subway on my way to work, I got to read another person’s Letter to the Editor on the “problem” of (illegal) immigration. The exchanges had already taken an interesting turn by the time I was reading them. Someone apparently used the word “infestation”(!) to refer to some people. That drew a sharp response from another reader who demanded that regardless of where we stand on the issue, the debate must begin with the critical recognition that immigrants are first and foremost fellow human beings, and it is utterly inhumane to describe them with such despicable terms otherwise used for rats, insects, and the like. Another reader then wrote back to say she hated how these people were unjustly exploiting the system. If they really like America so much, she argued, they should go back to their country and then go through the regular procedures and apply for immigration to the US.
Now this last comment, I thought, was particularly interesting because it revealed the extent to which most people are ignorant of what it takes to immigrate to the US. That is, legally. Let me just cite the example of a friend, whose parents had applied for immigration over a decade ago. (more…)
