Reference no: EM132452846
1. "Our soul strives to go to God. But each nation believes they have a God all to themselves , and he is the one and only God. But I believe it is the same God who made himself known through the voices of all sages ... let us not do anything that might hurt anybody anywhere in the world, for we are part of each soul, and each soul is part of us" (p.115)
Comment on this quote by Musa Naghi, a character in Ali and Nino, who is a Bahai'. How can these ideas be a model for people today?
2. Did you find the love story of Ali and Nino convincing? Do you believe that such an atmosphere of peacefulness and tolerance could have existed in a multicultural society 100 years ago? Why do you think this book was so popular and why was its society 100 years ago? Why do you think this book was so popular and why was its author (Kurban Said/Essad Bey)so popular in the 1930s in Germany??
3. "These queer gangs of Young Socialists, youths and gils {Nazis},....they strike one as strange. Something primitive, like loose roving gangs of broken, scattered tribes... As if everything and everybody recoiled from the old unison, as barbarians lurking in a wood recoil out of sight...
... The old spell of the world has broken, and the old, bristling, savage spirit has set in... And it is a happening of far more profound import than any actual event. It is the father of the next phase of events,"(The Orintalist, p.186)
How is this quite by the English writer D.H. Lawrence relevant in today's world?
4. Why did lev Nussinbaum convert to Islam convert to Islam? ( he did so, taking the name Essad Bey, in the Turkish Embassy - Which was still Ottoman) - in Berlin in August, 1922.)
5. Do you agree with Michael Ignatieff's conclusion that "the only global order that has closed societies, free and authoritarian ones. A pluralist order is one in which we live with leaders we can barely abide and societies whose principles we have good reason to despise."? What is your opinion of his advice to America to correct its " democratic dysfunction at home" before becoming involved in international disputes?