WE MUST BE FUNDAMENTALISTS CONCERNING COMPASSION – BBC RADIO 4

Tuesday, January 13th, 2015 - Community.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4 Programme Beyond Belief, Hazma Tzortzis, Head of Education and Research at iERA comments,
“I believe in fundamental values that are binding and unchanging. I believe that we all are fundamentalists in some way. That we have to be fundamentalists concerning compassion, concerning tolerance, concerning coexisting amongst different peoples. I believe we have to be fundamentalists when it comes to being non negotiable about certain moral values. But does that mean we are inflexible? No of course not. And I do appreciate that the term fundamentalist can mean extremist and can mean someone who is inflexible and intolerant but that is not what I mean…extremism is actually a deviation from the fundamentals.
We even have this perspective from the mouth of the Prophet Muhammad upon whom be peace…he used the term ghuluw. Ghuluw basically means extreme, don’t be extreme in your religion…I would argue that everyone has a fundamentalist worldview from that perspective, we believe somethings are nonnegotiable, somethings are objectively morally wrong. I believe killing an innocent child is objectively morally wrong, even if the whole world were to come and say its right, I would say no its wrong… however the way to transcend this type of fundamentalism rhetoric is by actually saying, you know what I may be wrong, let’s have a discussion, let’s have dialogue, let’s be open.”
For Hamza Tzortzis, start from 11:44

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