About a week after the beginning of the furor over the now-infamous Danish caricatures, I was walking through the streets of Cairo with an Egyptian friend. That particular day, between the dust and the cars and the groups of men remarking on my blonde hair, my friend noticed the wares of one of Cairo's many makeshift newsstands. He pulled me over, asked the seller for permission and then picked up something resembling a tabloid. The front page displayed a large picture of the Prophet Moses; the headline criticized the practice of portraying prophets in artwork. My friend pointed to the picture and asked, "This, what is this?" He looked at me calmly as he waited for an answer.
I replied that it was a picture of Moses.
"But," he said, "this is not okay."
I was at a loss. I wavered for a few moments, but then I remembered that the person talking to me was a trusted friend, and I could afford to probe the topic a little deeper. "Alright, I know that it's not okay in Islam, but Christianity has a rich tradition of religious artwork. They're just different beliefs - and that's okay," I said.
He didn't seem convinced. We put back the tabloid and kept walking. "But nobody knows what the Prophet looked like," he continued. This time, I nodded my head in agreement.
"It's just imagination," we both said at once.
Our conversation continued amicably, though I knew my friend was being careful not to offend me, as I was careful not to offend him. Our beliefs and shared interest in an open friendship had compelled us to wisely address an issue that might otherwise have silently built tension in the backs of our minds. Our encounter left me wondering how citizens of the world can help establish the open, respectful dialogue we had that day in an international forum.
As I considered ways to approach this endeavor, however, I immediately hit a wall: the notorious difficulty of establishing a dialogue. Dialogue - a continuing, free exchange of ideas that builds to increasingly enlightened conclusions - involves such goodwill that it's hard to imagine it materializing in our current volatile climate. Moreover, unequal power structures still ensure the marginalization of certain voices in favor of others; any truly "international" dialogue must naturally include all peoples, regardless of their political, cultural or socioeconomic standing. Finally, because national governments are currently facing a crisis of authority in the form of social fragmentation and militant anti-establishment ideologies, getting politicians to relax and just let people talk it out is a monumental task.
The second great obstacle to establishing international dialogue involves the most influential manifestation of a free international forum: the media. I would describe the modern media as tribal: its factions incessantly compete with each other hoping to attract readership, a process which to a certain extent facilitates dialogue but also has the potential for stifling it in favor of sensationalism and, as Maha Atal '08 recently wrote, the "fetishization of controversy." ("Desperate for drama," Feb. 22) Furthermore, as the media is perennially both society's mirror and its critic, it also has come to serve as a sort of antidote to globalization. Where migration and technology are forcing people into increasingly close contact with others whom they fear and distrust, the media offer ideological safe havens in which conversation can spiral around comfortable ideas and themes that reinforce an increasingly threatened sense of identity. The result is a lot of closed forums for people with similar voices and limited readership on the part of each forum.
Nevertheless, great hope for reform lies with the media. Nowhere else do you find the same push for truth and honesty; even at times when those goals are obscured, as they often are, the so-called "journalistic ethic" remains. Journalists defy taboos, they defy cultural expectations and they defy governments. Moreover, all people are fundamentally curious so long as they can overcome their fear of one another. If we can harness the reflective capabilities of the media while using it to appeal to human curiosity and hope, we may be able to get people out of their intellectual and cultural comfort zones and into a productive dialogue.
One day this goal may be realized. Perhaps, with a lot of exertion and faith in humanity's capability to overcome its current malaise, over the next 10 to 20 years we will have established enough of an international dialogue to begin understanding how many of our conflicts are irreconcilable and how many are, essentially, "just imagination."
Natalie Smolenski '07 doesn't talk about three things: politics, religion and football.
