Three small stories, to get back in shape.
The first takes place in a university class, a class which gives a history lesson of Islam. While the teacher speaks, a student gets up (just as you enter, late as usual) and started to bawl like rotten fish. You know this student, finally, you know who he is, is a bearded Pakistani from religious genre, who is studying electrical engineering. And you do not need to listen to his tirade over a minute or two to realize that the teacher was a little too historian, theologian and not enough for his taste. "No," says he, "it is absolutely impossible that this companion of the Prophet of Islam had acted out of political expediency, as the tradition leaves no doubt about his spiritual perfection."
The second story is a bit more abstract. She speaks with a slight decrease in the rate of unemployment in an area which we will not name due to an increase in jobs in manufacturing.
The third Finally, it is that of a man who has slept well last night, which breathes well for the first time in six months because, for the first time in six months, he may respond to calls from representatives of its card Credit harassing him: "Yes, I can repay. Yes, I have a job now."
The first of these is the haunting story of people like me who are looking for a job that will be asked to teach the history of a religion that is not theirs. And, frankly, universities recognized for their engineering programs are the most feared among historians of Islam. Several researchers have noted that the Islamist terrorist typical, far from being illiterate, tends to be a graduate in engineering, and have very little formal religious education (apart from the hours spent with a master self-taught). The same anger, the same conviction of being custodian of the Truth, the same binary perspective on the world (or the machine works or it does not work, or offer a theology of Truth or it is a lie) in a version slightly less deadly: That is a major source of stress among teachers of history of the Muslim World.
And if it is not Muslims, what will the fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalist atheists (who sometimes takes the urge to rip the guts to anyone who refuses to submit the Koran as a human invention misleading), in short, a throng of people who "know" who "know" much better than commonly historian prof. But I think I found my lifeline - and she did not even ask me intellectually dishonest. Yes, the adaptation will be difficult.
Look at my last two stories, two stories that are not actually one. And yet we do not understand much 'thing of the economic health of a region full when it is reduced to states of mind of an unemployed debt. Yet the moral dignity of a human being can never be reduced to a column of numbers.
The fact is that the historical and religious perspective can coexist, since we do not try to reduce one to another. And I know what I'll tell my students before they speak of the beginnings of Islam, whether Muslims, Christians and atheists: Your faith is simply too important to depend on the historical method.
And I do not even lie, except perhaps for those that the historical method is a religion but a few, they are heretics. And they deserve all the persecution that may have to submit them.
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