[EEJ] It is quite natural that “Unity” resonates well with all. That is why we often see the term being used by political, religious or social/ community organizations. Unity is something that should be pursued , and all unnecessary divisions which may lead to failure need to be avoided , and in Islam emphasizes on the importance of Unity.
However, for some unity appear be to synonymous to uniformity. Some Muslims appear to pursue a unity through which all Muslims think and act in an identical way in every issue. The moment they see diversified ideas among the Muslims on a given issue, they declare failure!
This kind of unity is ideal, and unachievable. People should look unity through their natural diversity. Otherwise, any effort to crush this natural diversity to `uniformity` would rather lead to fractured community with little opportunity to come together.
As long as there is unity in the objective, the variation in the process to get into the objective shouldn’t generate enmity. True, that at most attempt should be made to narrow the gap based on mutual understanding that, at the end of the day, they all share the same dream.
Naturally, this would bring the majority, and not all of the community members, share similar vision-not necessarily identical. It is from this stage onward that many seem to fail to carry on forward.
All groups who have similar visions are supposed to concentrate to on their activities and use their energy to prove that they are on the right path, unfortunately they turn against each other.We commonly waste our time and energy to smearing each other. Instead of establishing how better our approach is through our activities and results, we try to get this by discrediting our `opponent` who may be even turned as our `primary enemy` by now. If all sides were to focus on their objective, at the end of the day we may have one of them succeeded, which is a blessing of natural diversity- rather than putting all of our eggs in one basket.
Islam is a religion of tolerance, and we practically show this with our non-Muslim country fellows. I just wonder why we fail to exercise a fraction of it when it is among ourselves.
Uniformity is unachievable , and you may listen for more on this issue to Radio Negashi Editorail on how diversity should be considered as source of our strength rather than weakness.
