China's One Belt, One Road: Pakistan's Cautionary Tale

Back in 2015, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) section of China's One Belt, One Road (OBOR) Initiative was expected to bring economic development and jobs to Pakistan and also provide substantial benefits to China. The new deep water port at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea would enable China to transport oil from the Middle East up through Pakistan to western China rather than across the Indian Ocean and through the congested Malacca Straight between Indonesia and Malaysia to the South China Sea. By encircling India, the CPEC offered a way to balance or neutralize democratic India's influence in the region, but the CPEC also involved China in India's Kashmir border dispute with Pakistan high in the Himalaya Mountains. Shots fired on the border in Septemebr, 2020, violated an Indo-Chinese agreement. Pakistan found the terms of the CPEC less than transparent and a debt burden Beijing was unwilling to renegotiate. The Chinese support Pakistan expected for its border dispute with India failed to materialize. In fact, in September, 2017, China and India signed an anti-terrorist declaration that criticized Pakistan for shielding terrorist groups. The US even floats the notion that China might be an ally willing to help persuade Pakistan to pressure its Taliban friends to help stabilize neighboring Afghanistan. The bottom line is: Pakistan's deteriorating economy, made worse by the coronavirus, finds 18 million employees out of work. China, which expects repayment for the CPEC, has no need for Pakistan's textile exports. CPEC construction jobs failed to satisfy Pakistan's need for the education, technical training and scientific research necessary for modern employment, such as monitoring and correcting Pakistan's poor air quality. Finally, the CPEC involves atheistic China with a Muslim country, when China is trying to eliminate the Uighur Muslim culture in Kashgar, home of the Id Kah Mosque, and to control up to one million Uighurs in so-called re-education camps. At the same time, Pakistan's Hindu minority, already discriminated against in better economic times, is converting to Islam just to receive assistance from the government and charities.

You Have To Be Carefully Taught

If a child has never met a blind student from Peru, a Muslim actor, or a rich Chinese businessman, how will he or she feel about these people? In the musical, South Pacific, the U.S. soldier who begins to fall in love with an island girl he meets during World War II sings "You have to be carefully taught."

     Lucky children like Meghan Markle might have a black and a white parent, and a young President Obama even had a mother from the United States and a father from Kenya, got to spend early years in Indonesia, and grew to a young man in the diverse cultures of Hawaii. Lucky kids might get to know Hispanic, black, and white kids while playing basketball together on a neighborhood court. Korean and Italian kids could meet singing together in a church choir. And before a teen in a wheelchair and the school's aspiring ballerina publish their first comic book, they might have worked together on the school's newspaper.

     All sorts of robotic, marketing, math, trivia, and forensic competitions bring together kids with different backgrounds and genders. Yet, news events constantly show the danger of relying on luck to form children into adults who acknowledge the similarities and respect the differences of others. The fact is, children have adult mentors who influence them to think about people in ways that help or harm the world.

     In the United States, children are about to honor their Mothers on Mother's Day this weekend and their Fathers on Father's Day next month. Around the world, mothers and fathers should be honored, because they are in a powerful position. They can pass on their prejudices or open young minds.

     When trendwatching.com reports the Mexican startup company Sign'n, uses software to employ artificial intelligence that translates speech into Mexican sign language, we suspect someone nurtured a young inventor's concern for those marginalized because of their hearing disability. Likewise, visually-impaired  Brazilians employed to use their enhanced smell and taste senses as beer sommeliers have someone to thank for helping a young person learn to consider and remedy the needs of others.

     A Muslim friend recently introduced me to a book, Crescent Moons and Pointed Minarets, that uses rhymes and English translations of Arabic to present various shapes and to convey Islamic traditions and terms. At the end of the book, a Glossary provides definitions of the Arabic words used and a phonetic guide to their pronunciations.
     As an example of the way the book's author, Hena Khan, and artist, Mehrdokht Amini, combine words and art, picture how, under an arch embellished with complex borders and patterns of flowers and vines that resemble those in Persian rugs. readers learn:

Arch is the mihrab

that guides our way.

We stand and face it

each time we pray.

In contrast to picturing Muslims as over a billion religious people known for the early contributions of their mathematicians and astronomers, today's news reports Boko Haram added to its Nigerian terrorist kidnappings and killings by bombing a mosque and market. And Islamic fighters in Iraq commit genocide and sell Yazidi women and girls into slavery or hold them as sex slaves. Somehow these Muslims have not been carefully taught right from wrong. 

     Regimes, like those in Iran, China, and Russia, seem oppressive because they censure the broadcast and social media they allow their populations to see. But aren't we doing much the same thing, when algorithms select the books we read, the films we watch, and the news and ads we see, or when we self-censure by only watching the cable news stations that agree with us? Teaching ourselves and our children to keep open minds takes work, work both needed and worth doing...very carefully.

   

Muslim Perspective: Part 1 of a 3-Part Series

When I was writing about the effort Nelson Mandela and Ali Soufan made to understand their enemies (Blog post: "Fight, Flight, or Something Else"), I realized: 1) Muslims are not my enemies, 2) Some terrorists act on their interpretation of Islam, and 3) I want to learn more about the Muslim perspective. What I have learned thus far follows in the first of a 3-Part Series.

Muslims can look back on historic conquests over the fractured Balkan states north of Greece, the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, Spain, and the islands off Italy. Just northwest of the nearby ruins of Babylon, the ancient home of Hammurabi, Nebuchadnessar II, and Alexander the Great, Baghdad was part of the sprawling 7th century Islamic empire conquered after Mohammed's death in 632. Aside from paying taxes to their Arab conquerors, life for those in this vast area remained largely unchanged. Cosmopolitan Baghdad, which may have had a population of two million by the ninth century, resembled a city in ancient Rome. Traders from India, China, and the East Indies brought their luxury wares of spices, sugar, gems, silks,and porcelains to the wealthy port.

     In lands conquered by early Muslims, citizens who were Arab, Persian, Byzantine, Greek, Hindu, and Christian shared a peaceful co-existence. Famous biblical sites in Egypt and Palestine had begun to attract Christian pilgrims as early as the second century. According to fourth century sources, both women and men reported they had faced theft, murder, and other dangers on their way to see where Jesus had lived, but there was no mention of Muslims blocking their way.

     By the eleventh century, everything changed. Newly converted, fervent Muslim Seljuk Turks began attacking Christian pilgrims en route to the Holy Land. In response, Pope Urban II called for the Crusade that recovered Jerusalem in 1099. Missionaries attempted to convert Muslims in North Africa and western Asia, but Saladin, the Iraqi-born Sultan of Egypt and Syria, retook Jerusalem in 1187 by defeating the Third Crusade led by Richard the Lion Hearted. The last territory recaptured by the Crusaders was lost in 1291.

     A new band of Turkish converts to Islam replaced the Seljuk Turks during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Named for their leader, Osman, they set out to establish the Ottoman Empire. First to fall were Slavic Serbia and Bulgaria on the Balkan Peninsula. Constantinople was defeated in 1453 and Romania in 1500. Control of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, most of North Africa, and Tigris-Euphrates valley followed.

     By 1700, the Muslim Empire began two centuries of decline. In the east, Russia's power was on the rise just as corruption riddled the Ottoman Empire's government and its army failed to keep up with military advances. At the end of a six-year war in 1774, Russia won better treatment for Christians in the Ottoman Empire, dominated the northern Crimean coast of the Black Sea, and secured a warm water port with free passage to the eastern Mediterranean through the Dardanelle Straights, the canal-like sliver of water between the Black and Aegean Seas. Success was cut short by Napoleon's victories over Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1805 and 1806. By 1815, however, Napoleon's army was outnumbered by the combined forces of Moscow's allies: Britain the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia.

   

Why Do They Hate Us?

Let's begin by recognizing that Indonesia, a country where 86% of its estimated 252,812,245 population is Muslim, is a democracy with a traditional commitment to religious diversity. Despite opposition from extremists, Time magazine (April 27/May 4, 2015) noted that Indonesia's President Joko Widodo appointed a Christian woman as a district chief in Jakarta. In other words, hate for the West is not an emotion shared by all Muslims.

     Zak Ebrahim, whose father murdered a militant Jewish Defense League rabbi and helped plan the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, observed in his book, The Terrorist's Son, "murderous hatred has to be taught...forcibly implanted. It's not a naturally occurring phenomenon." It is, therefore, not to justify or condemn the feelings of Muslims who hate the West but to lay out the reasons Ebrahim's father, El-Sayyid Nosair, and those in Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, give to explain why they hate the West.

     Wright reminds us that Muslims went in two different directions after the death of Mohammed. The vast majority of Mohammed's followers are Sunnis who believe caliphs, Islamic clerics, should be elected. In contrast Shia Muslims, such as the Iranian Muslims who are Persians rather than Arabs, expected a hereditary caliphate, rule of Islamic clerics, to begin with Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Within the Sunni majority, a fundamentalist subset of Salafists believe the only valid Islamic practices are the "early Muslim" (Salaf) ways followed during the time of Mohammed (See a description in the earlier blog post, "This We Believe."). In Egypt, Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brothers in 1928 in order to form an Islamic state where the government, a Sharia legal code based on 500 immutable verses from the Quran, and lives would be centered on God. The Muslim Brotherhood came to be seen as a social service agency that provided jobs, schools, and hospitals and as an organization willing to achieve an Islamic state through the political process and compromise. Within the Brotherhood, a "secret apparatus," or army, also was formed to achieve this aim by violent means. The Ayatollah Ruhollan Khomeini, who formed a rigid theocratic state in the wealthy, modern country of Iran in 1979, sanctions this kind of terror and the use of the sword by warriors in a jihad, holy war, against infidels. Iran became a model for those who would impose religious dictatorships by force.

     To devout Muslims, infidels are those who practice a full array of godless, immoral behavior: homosexuality, adultery, divorce, the sexual freedom of women who flirt and wear enticing colors, close male and female dancing, jazz that arouses primitive instincts, drinking liquor and drunkenness, racism, violent sports, individualism, and materialism. Muslims believe Islam will triumph over both capitalists and communists, because modernity in the West, rather than focusing all aspects of life on God, has separated the secular and sacred, mind and spirit, state and religion, and science and theology.

     However, Muslim aspirations for forming an Islamic theocracy in Egypt were crushed by the secular regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser; Israel's swift victory in the 1967 Six Day War; and Anwar al-Sadat's secular democratic state, his ban on religious student organizations and traditional Islamic garb worn by university women, and Egypt's peace agreement with Israel. When a military plot to kill Sadat was successful in 1981, thousands were imprisoned in a 12th century dungeon where they were severely tortured. Among the prisoners was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a member of an underground cell that kept alive the idea of a jihad movement that would establish an Islamic state. When Zawahiri, who was a doctor, first went to Pakistan in 1980 to care for Afghan refugees who fled across the border following the Soviet invasion, he noted the training received by the Afghan freedom fighters or holy warriors, the "mujahideen," and how the area could serve as a base for recruiting an army of jihadists to take over Egypt and ultimately the West, considered to be the enabling force behind the Egyptian regime and state of Israel. Zawahiri's organization, which was strapped for money, would join forces with Osama bin Laden in the well financed al-Qaeda organization.

     The divide between supporters of secular governments and Islamic theocracies shows itself in a variety of countries. In Bangladesh, the secular Shahbag movement squares off against Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh, a group with ties to al-Qaeda in India. Al-Qaeda is taking credit for the May 12, 2015 murder of Ananta Bijoy Dash, who wrote for the Free Mind website that promotes secularism in Bangladesh.. Earlier, other Bangladesh bloggers, Avijit Roy, Oyasiqur Rhaman, and Ahmed Rajib Haider also had been killed by young Islamic activists. Dash had told friends that he did not expect anyone to kill him in his home in Sylhet.

     It should be noted that religion is not the only cause for the rise of what has become known as Islamic fundamentalism. Racism, and in some cases colonialism, has had an impact on non-whites.
In Egypt, for example, the poverty, disease, and illiteracy of the local population stood in stark contrast to the sporting clubs, hotels, bars, casinos, movie theatres, restaurants, and department stores that catered to the English upper classes and troops who began coming to Egypt when it became a British Protectorate in 1882. In fact, British troops continued to maintain a base in the Suez Canal Zone throughout half of the 20th century.

New York's Schools Close for Muslim Holy Days and Chinese New Year

How can you show students the importance of respecting each other's religious beliefs and national celebrations?


     Beginning in the 2015-2016 school year, New York City will add free days to its public school calendar for Muslim holy days and the Chinese New Year. By making Eid al-Adha (September 24, 2015) and Eid al-Fitr, which occurs during summer school, free days, the new calendar recognizes the size of NYC's Muslim population. Almost one million and nearly 10% of New York City's public school population are Muslim.

     New York City joins U.S. school districts in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, which already close to observe Muslim holy days.

(Religion also is the topic of earlier blog posts, "Respect the Faith" and "This We Believe.")

The Continuing Struggle between Good and Evil

Kayla Mueller's message of hope after she was kidnapped in Syria in 2013, like that of Anne Frank, and the story of Kayla's life, like the life stories of Nelson Mandela and Maximilian Kolbe, will live on long after ISIS is, at most, a footnote of history. But that is not to minimize the horror of Kayla's 18-month captivity. As a hostage, she was the slave property of ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Because she feared her American appearance would lead to their recapture, she refused to escape with non- Western female captives and was killed in an air strike in February, 2015.

     Coupled with news that Shiite attacks on government buildings in Yemen's capital have caused the US, UK, and France to close their Embassies is the regret Yemen's Muslim women have since they are no longer allowed to wear the colorful veils that used to identify their home villages. Shrouded in black veils, women are no longer free to express any individuality in public. Few remember when no women covered their faces 30 years ago and how, at the sea, some even wore colorful two-piece outfits with long skirts, bare midriffs, and tops with sleeves.

     Taliban captors in February, 2015 released Father Alexis Prem Kumar, who had been serving as director of Jesuit refugee services in Afghanistan when he was abducted. Despite violence and turmoil, women at the ARZU (the Dari word for "hope") Hope Studio, founded in the Bamyan region of Afghanistan in 2004, have continued to come together to carry on the weaving tradition that has produced lush rugs for centuries. Located in central Afghanistan, Bamyan's arts and architecture have been influenced by diverse Greek, Persian, Turkish, Indian, and Chinese cultures. In 2001, however, it was the site of the Taliban's destruction of three monumental Buddhist sculptures carved into a mountain in the fifth century. Yet, women at the ARZU Hope Studio persevere, incorporating wartime imagery and biblical verses into their woven panels, earning an income, maintaining a community garden, and funding a preschool, health care, and community centers.

     Boko Haram finds it unnecessary to recruit followers. Like their earlier abduction of more than 200 young women in Nigeria, the group continues to TAKE girls and women as wives, cooks, and suicide bombers and young men and boys as soldiers. These little soldiers will be facing about 300 former soldiers from the South African Defense Force who, according to the Financial Times (March 27, 2015), have gone to Nigeria to fight terrorists.

(The earlier blog post, "Hope for the Future," mentions some of the successes that help remind us past problems have been solved.)

 

This We Believe

Around their neighborhoods youngsters are likely to see churches, temples, and mosques. In the supermarket, they may observe women wearing scarfs and veils to cover their hair, men wearing turbans and yarmulkes, priests with round white collars, and women practicing the yoga discipline of Hinduism. Some of their friends may put up Christmas trees and attend church on Sunday. Others will observe a period of penitence from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, play with dreidels on Hanukkah, and go to temple on Saturday. For Muslims, their holy day is Friday. On a visit to an art museum, children see paintings of saints, statues of Buddha and Hindu gods, but, curiously, no representations of Muhammad.

     Since religions tend to concentrate in certain geographical areas, knowing even a few facts about the world's primary faiths helps children understand people from other countries. To than end, Barron's has published the series, This is my faith, to give children an overview of the world's major religions. In a country, such as Bangladesh, all major Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist holy days are national holidays. But different beliefs also can cause conflicts between peoples holding strong religious convictions. Christians launched Crusades against Muslims, and many Muslims oppose the Jewish state of Israel.

Mohammed's legacy

Of the world's more than six billion people who declare themselves a certain religion, nearly one out of every five is a Muslim. There are 150 million Muslims in both India and Pakistan and 125 million each in Bangladesh and Indonesia. Major concentrations of Muslims also can be found in Malaysia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco.

     Interest in the Islamic faith increased after September 11, 2001, when Muslims from the al-Qaeda organization flew the suicide missions that destroyed the twin towers in New York City and damaged the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The airplane hijackers saw themselves turning the West's technology against a materialistic, anything-goes lifestyle contrary to their religious beliefs. To counter this point of view, churches, schools, and other organizations began to publish materials and sponsor programs showing the Muslim faith espouses a pious way of life that does not sanction suicide, killing innocent civilians, or destroying places of worship. Friendship Press (friendshippress.org), for example, published the book God is One: The Way of Islam.

     The Muslim faith was founded by Mohammed, who was born about 570 into an Arab family in Mecca on the Red Sea coast of what is now Saudi Arabia. Drawing on Jewish and Catholic religious teachings he turned away from the worship of idols and recognized one true God, Allah. As a result of the divine revelations he received from the angel Gabriel, Mohammed assumed the role of the last and greatest prophet, in the line of Moses and Jesus. His teachings were collected and written in Arabic in the Muslims' sacred book, the Qur'an. Hadiths describing Mohammed's attitudes and lifestyle tell Muslim men to wear full beards and refrain from drinking alcohol, gambling, collecting interest on loans, and eating pork, considered to be unclean. Along with belief in one God, Muslims pray five times a day facing Mecca, fast from dawn to sunset daily during a month of Ramadan, and once in a lifetime try to make a pilgrimage to the Sacred Mosque at Mecca. Muslims consider all representations, even of Mohammed, sinful idolatry.

     To escape local protesters who resisted conversion, Mohammed fled north to the oasis of Medina, Saudi Arabia, with his wife; cousin Ali; and early convert, his father-in-law, Abu Bakr; in 622. Muslims consider this date of Mohammed's flight, or hegira, the first year in their calendar. Faced with the need to support his followers in Medina, Mohammed claimed a revelation justified attacks on caravans carrying goods from Mecca. Muslims martyred in what became a holy war, or jihad, against the infidel were promised a paradise that satisfied their sensual desires.

     After Mohammed died in 632, the Islamic world split to follow two different successors. Sunnis, who make up about 90 percent of the world's 1.6 billion Muslim population and are the Muslim majority in countries such as Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. These Sunnis favored electing a caliph to head a Muslim state. They followed Mohammed's knowledgeable early convert, Abu Bakr, who they recognized as their secular and religious leader. A number of Sunni Muslim groups have been organized to destroy Israel and its US ally. In 2014, fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), a radical strain of Sunnis, began terrorist attacks to take territory in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and northern Africa. In contrast, Sunni al Qaeda terrorists have no specific territory, although they have been active in Lebanon's Palestinean refugee camps and training camps in Afghanistan. Another fundamentalist subset of Sunni Muslims, known as Salafists, oppose Shi'ism and are willing to use violent jihad to purge society of all modern, Western influences and to create a government, proselytizing media, and social norms, such as coverings for women, that conform to rules laid down in the Qur'an. They consider all innovations that deviate from the straight path of Islam, submission to God, heresy that leads to hell. Consequently, they would eradicate the Shi'ites and impose strict Islamic law, or Shari'a, as interpreted in the "early Muslim" (Salaf) days of Mohammed, over the entire Muslim world.

    The smaller Shi'ite group of Muslims, located primarily in Farsi-speaking Persian Iran rather than in the Arab world, has a disproportionate amount of power, especially in oil-rich areas and, after the U.S. led defeat of Saddam Hussein, also in Iraq. Shi'ites, including those, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Shi'ites in Iraq, Yemen, and Bahrain, follow descendants of a hereditary successor, Muhammad's first cousin and son-in-law, the imam Ali ibn Abi Talib. In 1979, Iran's Islamic revolution overthrew the pro-American Shah of Iran and established the Middle East's first modern theocratic regime. Hezbollah's Shia suicide bombers hit the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanan and the U.S. Embassy there. Hezbollah fighters continue to terrorize Israel's northern border. Iran's determination to develop nuclear know-how is especially threatening to Israel.

    In contrast, Indonesia, whose estimated population of 253 million is 86% Muslim, is a democracy.

Judaic-Christian heritage

Two major events influenced early Jewish history. First, over 3000 years ago Moses led his people out of Egyptian captivity, received the Ten Commandments, and ushered God's chosen race into the Promised Land of Palestine. Secondly, King Solomon constructed the great Jewish temple in Jerusalem. In 135 Romans destroyed the Temple with the exception of the western wall, known as the Wailing Wall, and ordered the Jewish people out of Jerusalem forever. In 1917, Lord Balfour, Britain's foreign minister, raised the possibility of carving an Israeli state out of Palestine. London would gain an opportunity to implement Balfour's plan on September 11, 1932, when the League of Nations made Palestine a British mandate. In 1948, Israel became a Jewish state. Outside of Israel, nearly half of the world's Jewish population live in North America.

     Jewish people believe in one God but do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Consequently, their calendar is not divided into the period before Christ (B.C.) and after Christ (A.D.). The Torah is the sacred Jewish text that contains the five books of Moses, and the Talmud, which records Jewish law and legend, prescribes a code of living. Rabbis serve as Jewish teachers and synagogue officials who, among other responsibilities, prepare 13-year-old boys for their bar mitzvahs and 12- or 13-year old girls for bat mitzvahs. These ceremonies welcome young people who have studied to achieve a mature understanding of Judaism as adult members of the Jewish community. In some areas, Jewish and Christian families gather in late March or early April to share a Passover Seder, or banquet. Together they celebrate the Israelites' hasty escape from Egypt, when Moses delivered his people from slavery, and the Christian holy day, when Jesus ate his Last Supper with the Apostles.

Catholicism

From the earliest days of the Catholic Church, missionaries have followed the example of Saint Paul, who took advantage of Rome's Appian Way and extensive road network to spread Christianity. As a result, in addition to more than 500 million Christians in both Europe and Latin America, there are over 400 million Christians in Africa, more than 350 million in Asia, and about 277 million in North America.

     Christians recognize the Bible, Old and New Testaments, as the inspired word of God. Catholics also rely on tradition and abide by the authority and teachings of the Pope in Vatican City. They believe there are three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in one God and that Jesus, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, is both God and man. Jesus is recognized as the Savior who mysteriously loved mankind enough to die on a cross in order to appease God for man's original sin in the Garden of Paradise. The sacrifice of Jesus reopened a heavenly paradise to mortal man.

     Throughout the centuries, Christianity's 2.2 has fragmented. Slavic countries, following the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 988, formed the Russian Orthodox church. In 1100, the patriarch in Constantinople, head of what became known as the Greek Orthodox Church, separated from the Pope. Protestant Christians, such as Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians, continue to espouse a personal relationship with Jesus but, beginning in the 1500s, their ministers were no longer ordained or bound by bishops consecrated by the Pope.

Approaching Nirvana

Hinduism, as it developed in India some 3500 years ago, recognizes a Trimurti of three great gods: Brahma who created every life form in the world; Shiva, the destroyer who brings forth new life; and Vishnu, the preserver. In contrast to Islam, the world's one billion Hindus in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Guyana, and Suriname use statues of millions of gods to represent different aspects of the one universe.

     Hinduism does not promise believers a material heavenly reward. Instead, most followers believe in karma, i.e. a person's present life form is an inevitable reflection of good and bad deeds performed in a past life. Ultimately, good souls are reborn into higher and higher life forms until they reach Nirvana, a state of peace and nothingness when the cycle of life, death, and rebirth end. Evil people, according to the Hindu faith, are reborn into lower life forms that require more reincarnations. The idea of transmigration, or constant reincarnation into higher or lower life forms, leads to the conclusion that even an insect should not be killed and that cows should not be eaten.

     Just as Muslims journey to Mecca and Catholics make pilgrimages to sites where Mary, the mother of Jesus, has appeared and miracles have occurred, Hindus travel to the sacred Ganges River, the dwelling place of the goddess Ganga, to bathe, ask for her blessing, and seek freedom from the pain of rebirth. For Kumbh Mela every 12th year, as many as 80 million Hindu pilgrims travel to Allahabad to bathe in the Ganges in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Wherever they are, Hindus use meditation, symbolized by a third eye, to escape the pain and sorrow introduced through the senses, and they use the discipline required to hold yoga positions for long periods of time as a way to free their minds from earthly concerns.

Buddhism

The meditation and physical discipline of Hinduism failed to satisfy the wealthy young prince from India who founded Buddhism, a religion practiced primarily in Asia. In the sixth century before Christ, after he saw a man suffering from old age, another from disease, and another dying, Gautama Siddhartha, who would later hold the title of Buddha, launched a search for happiness. While sitting under a fig tree, defined as the Bo Tree or tree of enlightenment, Siddhartha determined that overcoming selfishness was the key to happiness. In the Tripitaka, which contains his teachings and monastic rules, Buddha counseled followers to know themselves, to concentrate on their inner resources, and to see life as it is with all its suffering and sorrow. Following the Noble Buddhist Path to personal enlightenment and social harmony requires right understanding, thought, speech, action, effort, and concentration. In other words, Buddhists strive to avoid anger, violence, lying, gossiping, and stealing. Without the help of idols, temples (the wat), or holy men, Buddha taught that followers could attain the Nirvana of Hinduism by performing their own good works.

     Prior to the opening of the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing, demonstrations broke out in the Tibetan region of China, where Buddhist monks have been under attack since 1959. At that time, the 23-year-old traditional Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India, where he has remained in exile for nearly 60 years. From his home in Dharamsala, he urges the leaders in China, where there are 244,000 Buddhists, to see that harmony comes from the heart not from force. As he has said, "In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher." Nonetheless, as recently as July, 2013, Yu Zhengsheng, who is in charge of ethnic minorities in China, said the country will continue its struggle against the Dalai Lama.  Contrary to the belief that  all Buddhists espouse non-violence, in Burma (Myanmar), the radical Buddhist monk, Wirathu, has been preaching hatred for Muslims. His sermons have led to violence against Muslim minorities not only in Burma but also in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia.

     Like Catholics and Hindus, Buddhists do not consider statues idolatry. Actress Jennifer Aniston, for example, has a Buddhist statue of Avalokiteshvara, goddess of compassion, in her office. Although the Buddha taught that there is no one all powerful God, many followers pray at his shrines and celebrate his life and teachings on the Makha Bucha holiday as though he is one. Huge statues of Buddha dot Pakistan, India, Thailand, Japan, Korea, and Cambodia. These statues may be standing, sitting with legs crossed in the lotus position to represent emerging like a lotus plant from the mud to reach enlightenment, or lying down to indicate having reached Nirvana through death. Hand positions, or mudra, vary to signal welcome, no need to fear, meditation, victory over distractions, or that the Buddha is teaching. A popular 14th century Tibetan scroll painting features a blue skinned Buddha who is said to have the power to heal.

Peace through religious understanding

Brief descriptions of these major religions offer some idea of the impact they have on the behavior of people throughout the world. These descriptions also help adults introduce young people to the similarities and differences of the world's religions and respond to children when a movie, television show, or news item, such as the recent attack on a Sikh temple, pique their interest in sacred concepts. In the movie Mulan, for example, the dead relatives of a young Chinese girl care about her in the manner China's moral philosopher, Confucius, described in his teachings about ancestor worship six centuries before Christ. Pocahontas, on the other hand, showed a Native American girl who viewed spirits in nature in much the same way as children might if they practiced the Shinto faith in Japan. Exposure to other religions, even the superstitions, fertility cults, animistic fetishes, and voodoo found in Africa and Haiti, helps children gain insight into the way people in other countries think and live.