Day 335 – Every Monday I am taking a class for the tour guide course. We cover so many different subjects and it is fascinating for me. We cover religions as one of these subjects. We already covered Christianity and Judaism and this week we started with Islam. I am ashamed to admit how little I knew about it, how little I know now. I learned about the beginning of Islam what was there in the Arabian Peninsula 1000 years before Mohamed was born. I learned about the things that had a major influence on the development of that the Islam at the beginning. I learned how little I know and how much I made assumptions about things I knew almost nothing about. I also realized how important it is to learn Arabic; if I want to understand it I have to understand the language since a language is the gateway and the key to society. It is a very intriguing class and the teacher was challenging us all the time, making us realize how little we know about our neighbors how little we understand. Some people where upset with the teacher and his bold methods, but I found it very interesting and inspiring. It made me realize that if we ever want to understand the people living among us, if we ever want to find a way to live together in harmony and with respect to each other we’ll have to understand their culture and their way of thinking. It is disrespectful and naïve to believe otherwise.
I am thankful for a very inspiring class today. I am thankful the teacher opened my eyes to my ignorance and motivated me to seek some knowledge beyond the scope of class; I already ordered a book he recommended and I will check about learning Arabic. I am also thankful to my son, who just took a whole semester in college about that, for a very interesting talk we had about it tonight; I love these hour long discussion we do and I really missed it. I am thankful for his visit.
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