152 Global Ethics for Leadership
years old as in the killings on a beach in Tunisia). I responded to the
young boys in a motherly way saying, “beta (son), I will ask you your
opinion on this topic after the course too so please bear with me”. In the
subsequent months, we studied the religion of Islam and the inclusive
attitude of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon Him) towards “the
People of the Book”, we studied the Charter of Madina, we saw a docu-
mentary film on the Abrahamic faiths, we debated the dialogue of civili-
zations as opposed to the clash of civilizations, we looked at Pakistan’s
own founding fathers (Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan, Dr. Allama Iqbal and
Muhammad Ali Jinnah) who all emphasized education, the rule of law
and minority rights as an absolute necessity for progress. We included
two community projects in which students went out into the community
to do fieldwork on perspectives, problematic attitudes and attempted to
build bridges between different communities. Finally, the class acted out
a play, the Trial of Dara Shikoh by Professor Akbar S. Ahmed, in which
students act out the entire scene of the Mughal empire—this play is
about the struggle for power and perspective—it is also a tragedy about
a scholar-saint who was inclusive of all others but who was killed by his
brother for holding an inclusive perspective—he was accused as a here-
tic and apostate.
In another class we looked at the difference between religion (e.g. Is-
lam) and culture (e.g. Pukhtunwali), which can be two opposites, but
both people themselves (as well as the Western media confuse the two,
thus honour killings which is a cultural issue is blamed on Islam; anoth-
er example is female circumcision which again is culture specific and is
wrongly said to be an Islamic practice). Finally, we looked at the build-
ing blocks of dialogue—what is dialogue? What is Empathy? What is
respecting the other and his/her way of dress/behaviour/ideas/foods? We
studied that it is necessary to understand that it is ok to disagree without
resorting to violence. Imagine the impact on the minds of the boys from
Waziristan and Quetta.