Peace in Diversity 14910.4 Teaching Acceptance: A Teacher’s Training
Manual
Accepting Difference is a textbook for students, and accompanying
this is Teaching Acceptance a training manual for their teachers. Step by
step and subject by subject, this manual explores the tools of peace
building and counters a radical extremist narrative. Based on an interdis-
ciplinary approach, Accepting Difference draws upon sociology, anthro-
pology, history, religion in the social and political sciences to explore
periods of conflict and coexistence. Both models show how to do peace
and to avoid conflict. It also explores ways of conflict resolution and
how to negotiate in difficult conflict situations.
The book explores a play in which different perspectives within Is-
lam are discussed—based in South Asia, Prince Dara Shikoh is the son
of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal. Unlike his
younger brother Aurangzeb who took over the Mughal throne and ruled
stringently, Dara and his spiritual teacher, Mian Mir reached out to peo-
ple of other faiths and tried to build bridges by befriending them and by
participating in their religious festivals. Sufi saint, Mian Mir, for in-
stance, laid the foundation stone of the Sikh temple in Amritsar. His
spiritual student, Prince Dara Shikoh in 1657 carried out a scholarly
translation of the Hindu sacred texts the Upanishads called Sir-e-Akbar
(the Great Mysteries) through which these texts were accessible to
Western scholars—German scholars in particular, such as Arthur Scho-
penhauer were influenced by this work and praised it as “the production
of the highest human wisdom”. It’s teachings that the individual is a
manifestation of the one basis of reality attracted German philosopher
such as Schelling and others. They saw the world differently to that
propagated by the churches and, thus, the Upanishads fascinated them.
These German idealists, in turn, influenced the Transcendentalists in
America. Little do people like Donald Trump who want to ban Muslims