Negotiations

My notable quote for the day is from a Pakistani Muslim intellectual Egqbal Ahmad on negotiating Islam with Democracy:

“One must make an effort to understand the past, understand it with compassion, sympathy, and criticism. The reason I am stressing that is that many of us Arab and Muslim intellectuals, know more about the West, more about modern history, more about the ideas of the Enlightenment than we do about our own [history and culture]. No significant change occurs unless the new form is congruent with the old. It is only when a transplant is congenial to a soil that it works. Therefore, it is very important to know the transplant as well as the native soil.”

We Filipinos might take some pointers too, in our continuing search for ourselves as well as our place in the world. We must look back to see the future.