Pomegrenade

Terrorist? Damned? Friend? Foe?

This photo was taken at a little market in Yazd. Noticing that I was not from town, the fruit seller waved me over for some pomegranate which was in season. I snapped his photo and gladly took up his offer after the customary taarof bantering. The two ayatollahs beside me shared some of my pomegranate and asked me where I was from. We had a little chat about life, Iran, Singapore, Christianity and how we are all Ibrahimis or people of the book. They wished me good luck on my journey and scribbled their phone numbers on my notebook. I was to call if I had any trouble getting around. Unfortunately, they did not have email addresses which would have made it easier to keep in touch.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that taxonomy is the framework for our rational thinking and because of this, Man has always sought solace in labels and categories. The journalist Robin Gill said that "fundamentalism may be defined tentatively as a system of beliefs and practices which treats scriptural absolutism as the way to counter the pluralism and relativism engendered by modernity". In our new "age of anxiety", fundamentalism offers certainty and security. God has spoken and He has spoken clearly and this is what He has said. The Qur'an burning ruckus raised by a nondenominational church in Florida shows that fundamentalism and its rise needs to be examine in various forms and in different faiths. Maybe on this anniversary of the September 11 bombings, we should realign our thought classifications and look beyond "us and them". Fundamentalism is a disease that plagues our society. Like all diseases it needs to be treated, but not with fundamentalist attitudes.