OVERCOMING RELIGIOUS SECULAR DIVIDE: ISLAM’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

LANGUAGE is a powerful dimension of social existence and interaction. It facilitates communication among individuals, and helps create agreement and consensus. It is, as such, an essential tool for advancing both knowledge and society. Nevertheless, language can be also a source of antagonism, misunderstanding, and confusion, and therefore has the power to undermine social harmony and to close the human mind. The impact of language on thinking and behaviour is particularly noticeable when communication and exchange take place across cultures. Under such circumstances, the question of commensurability becomes relevant. The question can be posed as thus: Can peoples with different historical experiences have a meaningful exchange of ideas, given the fact that understanding the meaning of a term presupposes an experience of a sort of the object to which the term refers? The relationship between knowledge and experience gives rise to a series of questions with regard to understanding the grand concepts of "religion," "secularism," and "liberalism," and the way each relates to the others. Such terms are not easily and fully interchangeable across cultures and civilizations, and misunderstanding results from extrapolating one's experience across cultures. Thus, superimposing the experience of a historically determined being on another - be it an individual or a community - is bound to stifle or even destroy the latter's chance to develop and mature.