Karim: Yeah all humans. The people of faith and there are people faith in the United States and in Europe and they are concerned about the direction that the world is taking. They don’t want to see religions fight and clash with this exclusivist claims that cancel each other out. Though that era should have ended and for it to be perpetuated today in the ways that it’s being done is very disturbing. But my concern of course is with what Muslims are experiencing and also to help non-Muslims have a little better appreciation of the dilemma that Muslims face. We have to hope that the rational depth of the Islamic tradition which has a spiritual component by the way you see. So the more understanding and sophisticated you become in your thinking then the better human being you should be and the more compassionate and the more decent you should become. So what we find in western pattern you can get someone who is a brilliant genius and invents some, discovers some physical law that benefits everyone on the planet and yet he goes home and he beats his wife and shouts at his kids ad kicks his dog. He’s not any better human being for his knowledge. What I’m trying to point out in Islamic view of knowledge is that knowledge helps transform your individual personality and psyche to become a better human being. And if it’s not doing that then it’s not good knowledge, its bad knowledge. And this something that I think your American society forgot or overlooks often. The best thinkers among us in this part of the cultural sphere understand that and are looking at that and are concerned about it. Science and technology in or society has reached a dead end. Why? Its killing us, look at the planet. So how can we make our knowledge useful and beneficial and not poisonous? This is an issue for all of us of course; Muslims maybe have not reached that point because they’re still struggling at an earlier level with their own engagement, with reason.
Interviewer: Okay are there?
Karim: We can get some questions maybe from the floor.
Interviewer: Yes, anybody who would have a question for Dr. Crow?
Karim: I hope I was comprehensible, hope I don’t sound like a cruel…
Person: I’m Stanley [IB], I’m with the [Kedo] Institute but I also studied at Georgetown, I saw that you were at Georgetown. Let me take this out of the Islamic context for a minute to the philosophical context, we are talking about modernity; you mentioned the enlightenment. I mean Germany, Germany certainly had the reformation, had the enlightenment [IB], it had a rejection of modernity with the emergence of the Nazis; came out of the most advanced society arguably in Europe: great university tradition, great deal of knowledge and yet it emerged. To make the question short I am fixed on the question of war. When I read about the Muslim world now, I read a lot about war, the sense of humiliation, resistance of occupation and I’m wondering what allowed the Nazis to emerge, to reject modernity? Humiliation in war, the loss of war, [IB] the idea of stabbed in the back, [IB]. Is this common to the human condition? We are looking at this as an intellectual condition so I’m looking at also a more practical gear that perhaps deserves some more attention.