Aga Khan University

Pakistan

<p>Harvard Professor Ali Asani, recently participated in a panel on religious pluralism at the Harvard Divinity School, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of College&rsquo;s undergraduate programme in comparative religion, and in celebration of the University&rsquo;s Pluralism Project. &ldquo;The dream,&rdquo; Asani said, &ldquo;is to introduce a course, required of all Harvard students, regardless of the faculty, using the pluralism case method.&rdquo; He said he envisions class sections that would mix together students from different parts of the University in the same classrooms. The course, he said, would give students &ldquo;the tools and frameworks to engage with and understand difference. That should be one of the attributes of any graduate of Harvard.&rdquo; When he said this, listeners in the room applauded. This is a pitch he has made before. Asani recalled being in Pakistan on October 7, when Hamas attacked Israelis, setting off the current war. He was there that day to make a presentation to the Karachi-based Aga Khan University (an institution with roots at Harvard), promoting the idea of a required case-method course on pluralism. He returned to Cambridge afterward to find &ldquo;everything here was a mess,&rdquo; and in need of the same kind of pluralism instruction he&rsquo;d been advocating abroad. &ldquo;At this moment,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;everyone&rsquo;s seeing the world through binaries, and we know how dangerous binaries are.&rdquo; He paraphrased Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy, who wrote that the impulse to categorize human beings into single categories leads to a &ldquo;haziness of vision,&rdquo; Asani said, which &ldquo;the champions of violence will exploit.&hellip;That is exactly what&rsquo;s happening here.&rdquo; The question now, Asani continued, is &ldquo;How to move from this binary world that we have been forced into, and go into a pluralist mode? How do we change the narrative? This is something that we have to struggle with.</p>

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