For good or evil, we are a single people: the more we become conscious of this, the less difficult and long will be humanity’s progress toward justice and peace.
— Primo Levi
The world is getting increasingly uncomfortable with the proliferation of race and religious tensions. There are more people displaced today than at any time since World War II. Divisive politics are exacerbating these trends by preventing action on the one hand while fueling hate, bigotry, and intolerance on the other hand.
Now more than ever, we must come together as Bani Adam, the “Children of Adam”—an aphorism by thirteenth-century poet Sa’adi that calls for the breaking of barriers preventing the progress of humanity as one and as a whole. Underneath the superficial differences and distinctions that have long been used to divide us, we all have the same fundamental needs, after all, for connection, purpose, and to matter in this vast universe.
“For one human being to love another,” wrote Rainer Rilke, “that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
If humanity is our race, love should be our religion. And although I admit that it’s easy to love a perfect God and far more difficult to love fellow human beings—insecure and imperfect as we are—we must realize that all human beings, without exception, have a unique place among God’s creation. “I breathed into him of My Spirit,” He says in the Qur’an.
If there is any moral principle that we must understand, it is that humanity is as one single body, and each faith, all races are the different organs. The well-being of each of those organs determines the happiness and well-being of the entire body. Ask yourself just how often you feel strain throughout your body when just one organ is in pain.
Faced with overwhelming violence and suffering, we need to rediscover our Oneness.
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