The Essentialist Reduction of Muslims in Inter-Faith Dialogue:
Why dialogue is risky but necessary nonetheless
By Farish A. Noor
The inter-religious dialogue process is a risky yet necessary vernture. For more than a decade now I have been part of the so-called international dialogue circuit and during this time I must have participated in around a hundred of these dialogues between the Western world and Islam.
Notwithstanding the physical cost of these dialogue sessions that have worn me out by now, I still would like to argue that they are necessary despite the numerous epistemic and ideological pitfalls that we need to negotiate when we enter the process.
But before I continue, allow me to state my reservations first:
For a start, I am doubly worried that we have inadvertently contributed to what can be called the ‘inter-faith dialogue industry’. By this I am referring to the fact that too many of these dialogues have been harnessed upon the bandwagon of realpolitik geopolitical interests and that too often the terms of the dialogue have been set by nation-states and governments who are, in terms of their status as actors and agents in the dialogue process, not the best models of dialogue at work. If and when the dialogue process is beholden to the state and the interests of governments, they become useless for the simple reason that what we have instead are dialogues between elites who are really talking politics rather than ethics, and what often passes as dialogue is little more than the meeting of kings, presidents and prime ministers that take place in plush hotels and sponsored by corporate giants. Precious little time is spent on serious philosophical discussion and instead more time devoted to photo sessions and celebrity talk shows. This is, frankly, useless and a waste of public resources.
Secondly there is always the attendant worry that during such abstracted dialogues when subjectivities are squeezed out of the discussion all we have left are abstracted discussions that create and perpetuate the divisions they purportedly aim to overcome in the first place. The very notion that there is a singular, simplied ‘West’ that can dialogue with an equally simplified ‘Muslim world’ is self-defeating and gets us nowhere, save to prop up the very same stereotypes that have bedevilled real dialogue all along.
