FORUM: Children should learn about others’ beliefs and values

Editor’s note: In a series of stories, USA TODAY and the Courier-Post have explored increasing diversity in the United States and in South Jersey. In New Jersey, the chance of meeting someone of a different race or ethnicity in 1960 was 16 percent. Today, it is 60 percent and rising. As recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, have reminded us, change does not come easily or all at once.

As part of the Courier-Post’s coverage on the changing face of our region, we have invited a number of community leaders to participate in a thoughtful in-person

discussion this week. In advance of the meeting, we asked them what South Jersey needs to do to prepare for our increasing diversity. Rafey Habib’s response follows.

The events currently unfolding on the world-historical stage — especially in relation to the Muslim world — remind us of the dangerous consequences of ignorance and misunderstanding.

In the Middle East, Muslims, Christians, and Jews have co-existed peacefully for centuries; the Quran urges the protection not only of mosques, but also of churches and synagogues. Yet now we witness mindless intolerance and bigotry.

It is important that we do not replicate such narrow-mindedness in our local communities, and that we strive for greater mutual understanding. In South Jersey, we need to promote the excellent work that is already being conducted by interfaith organizations, which arrange interfaith classes, lectures on various religions and seek to define the common core of religious faith.

But we also need our school boards and school curricula to reflect the religious and cultural diversity of our community. Today, it is necessary for children to learn about one another’s beliefs and values, and they can do this only with guidance from teachers who are appropriately trained and from the use of textbooks which have the sanction of experts in their respective fields.

It is our responsibility not only to educate ourselves about faith — including our own faith — but to ensure that we bequeath to our children a vision of hope, a unifying vision which stresses our common humanity and which understands what the great religions have in common, which again is a persistent theme in the Quran.

Only then can we began to combat the darkness that is rising in our world.

Rafey Habib is professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden.

‘Ferguson’

by Rafey Habib

demons come to me

I see what I see

there’s no poison, no ointment,

nothing foreign, in his blue eyes

that gaze upon the law like a child,

his nose straighter than his aim

straighter than any demon

incomprehensible

whose rage breaks out loud

filled with voices estranged

demons, bred within

his innocent brain

he sees no one in them,

untouchable