“The European or American who has come to Islam...stands astride the oldest frontier in the world, the frontier that has separated Islamic civilization, first from Christendom and later from the post-Christian world, for some thirteen centuries. This is in many ways a strange position to occupy because the frontier runs between two areas of reciprocal incomprehension, and to be at home in both is, in a sense, to commute between two different planetary systems. The Westerner’s inability to understand the Muslim is matched by the Muslim’s incapacity to understand the Westerner. Those who stand astride the frontier find themselves obliged to act as interpreters between two different languages and must themselves speak both with adequate fluency.”
Charles Le Gai Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man
The challenge of Muslim-Christian understanding, so well stated by Eaton (a Swiss convert to Islam), is really what the challenge of growing from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism is all about - growing in ability to enter into another world and learning to understand and adapt to that world, and then to be one who can stand astride cultural frontiers, frontiers of reciprocal incomprehension, and act as interpreter between those in the different systems.
The world desperately needs more such people, in these days of tension and conflict along the divide.
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