The Courage to Know One Another
These remarks were made on February 27, 2026 at an Iftar dinner at the Islamic Institute of America
Assalamu Alaykum,
Peace be with you all.
This simple greeting of peace – the most commonly repeated greeting among Muslims is marvelous. We should somehow make it universal, don’t you think? We all need a constant reminder to seek peace and find peace in all our undertakings.
I think we all need to be reminded that Christians and Muslims and Jews share much.
A desire for peace.
A desire to live godly lives
A desire to be blessed by Allah.
But I think we have to say that there are many difficulties that get in our way. The way we live our lives in our communities does not tend, in itself, toward peace. And I would be so bold as to say here that our community lives do not lend themselves toward living the way Allah would want us to live.
I have heard many times these words from the Holy Qur’an: “O mankind! We have created you from a single pair, male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another.”
And yet, my friends, segregation is the default condition in the USA, in Metropolitan Detroit. We live separated and apart. It may not be the way God would want, but it is normal for us. We do not know one another.
As a result, because we do not live together – truly live together – we do not know one another and so misunderstanding is normal also.
As ‘people of the book’ we are taught to invite strangers into our tents. We are required to love our neighbors. We are admonished to know one another. And so if we wish to live the way God would want and not live in separated communities where we do not know one another, resulting in much misunderstanding, we have work to do.
So how do we do that work? it’s going to take courage.
Courage to leave our comfort zone.
Courage to go out and actually ask to be welcomed. Not just welcome others in, but also be determined to join with others outside of our comfortable communities. We will have to seek opportunities to be together, to be known and know each other.
It will take courage to become knowledgeable. We will need to ask questions, and we will need to learn.
So my message today is to have courage and encourage others. There is too much living apart in our communities and there is too much misunderstanding.
I want my Christian brothers and sisters; my Jewish brothers and sisters and my Muslim brothers and sisters to reach out to one another. It will take courage because we know from the start that we are not going to agree on everything. We know for sure we don’t agree exactly on religion and theology and yet we here do not let that get in the way.
And we are not going to agree on history. On that we may need to agree to disagree. But there will be surprises too. We may find that we agree on more than we thought. We may find that our assumptions about others are wrong as I have often found. We may find that our words and common ways of saying things are misunderstood; that by diplomatically changing our wording our true meaning is no longer misunderstood.
In fact, I think we could agree on two very big things: supporting the human dignity of all and the absolute requirement to care for the stranger.
On this basis we could agree to seek more understanding and with deeper understanding, seek to continue to be diplomatic, making sure that our words convey what is in our hearts and that they do not offend others carelessly. It will take effort and courage to learn from and know one another.
In the IFLC organization, we call this creating common ground. Not finding common ground, but creating it together.
I expect that in doing this courageously we will find each other’s humanity and that we share a common sense of pain about what is going on in the world today. We may not agree totally on the reasons for that pain, but recognizing that common sense of pain and woundedness is a start. At least that. And from there we may be able to share a desire to do something about it, to diminish that pain together somehow. Strength and resolve will come from our common efforts
as we encourage each other.
So It is my hope that all of us together will have courage and break out of the straight jacket of being segregated that is our norm, coming to know one another as our faiths require.
-Robert Bruttell
