Tribalism is one of the words. The professor in me is saying, "What do you mean by that?" I recall your other blog in which you mentioned professors doing that to you! We can't help it. It's our job! But really, what do you mean by that?

I think I understand you on the Muslims in Rwanda. The most pivotal moment in my life was when I "found out" about the Holocaust. I think I was 14, but maybe younger now I realize. I was in 6th grade? How old is that? Anyway, I started reading books and watching films dealing with this very question. It was non-stop this for me at least a couple of years. Then it dogged me for the rest of my life.  How to not make things worse, let alone how to do what is right.  Who are we in these moments, what do we do when faced with these crises, hwhat do we do in the mundane moments that seem like nothing but are catastrophic in the end. I read any fiction arising from the Holocaust I could get my hands on. I saw films, endless films, just about being human. I became a devotee of Bergman. But it was Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem that saved me. I've finally gone back and re-read it. It is a history of the Holocaust in the context of Eichmann's trial. It was written as a series of articles for the New Yorker and then pulled together. Her observations about Eichmann and the pieces that fell together to create the Holocaust became one of the most famous ethical observations made in Western Philosophy. There is no monster, evil is banal. I've since been going through most of her work. There is a fantastic collection of essays written towards the end of her life. They summarize her work. The following quote is from "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship" in which she addresses the different forms of culpability and the odd resistance of many to simply think and judge rather than follow blindly—meaning with their own hands over their eyes.

"We see here how unwilling the human mind is to face realities which in one way or another contradict totally its framework of reference. Unfortunately, it seems to be much easier to condition human behavior and to make people conduct themselves in the most unexpected and outrageous manner, than it is to persuade anybody to learn from experience, as the saying goes; that is, to start thinking and judging instead of applying categories and formulas which are deeply ingrained in our mind, but whose basis of experience has long been forgotten and whose plausibility resides in their intellectual consistency rather than in their adequacy to actual events" (Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 37).

“Evil is banal”. Isn’t that the truth! And, darn, that’s significant.

- A Salafi in worship, a Sufi in society, a Secularist in government.

Yeah OG, once we say that then we start asking what does it mean to carry the Trust.

I’m ending a paper I am writing on the ethical problem of verse 4:34 with Muhammad’s saying about the Last Day. Something to the effect of if you knew what I knew you would laugh less and cry more. I cannot hear that except as a comment on what he knows about the true weight of human responsibility, the Trust.