Abu Walid al Masri responds to Charles Cameron
Abu Walid has responded a letter from Charles Cameron. Abu Walid’s response to Charles can be found here. You’ll notice when following the link, that he has a new website.
It’s well worth a look. There is also an interesting comment from a reader below Abu Walid’s response to Charles; it’s from “one of the victims of Guantanamo”.
As you’ll see from his website Abu Walid is also engaging in a number of other interesting dialogues at the moment, which I am interested to read as they progress.
Charles wrote his letter in response to the dialogue Abu Walid and I had a little while back. For those of you new to the site, you can find this dialogue to the right in the page links section. The letter from Charles can be found on my blog here.
I’m grateful to both Charles and Abu Walid for their time and effort to write their respective letters and willingness to participate in such a unique dialogue. I think both letters are quite amazing. And I’m envious of the way both Abu Walid and Charles write.
These letters may not change anything, but they are important because in mass media sometimes only the most controversial and polarising views tend to make it into the news.
I think person to person contact, especially via mediums like this, can go some way to providing opportunities for all of us to discover or be reminded that there is more than one viewpoint and along with differences there are also similarities. Contact like this humanizes people, and in my book that’s never a bad thing.
A translation of Abu Walid’s letter won’t be in the works for quite some time, but I will add it to the stack of things I hope to return to as soon as the dissertation goes in.
That’s not due to happen for another month or so and then there will be the inevitable back and forth from both supervisor’s final comments, before submission, so it may still be several months before I can catch up on all the things outstanding here. Apologies for that, but I will get to it all as best I can, once the thesis is out of the way.
My thanks again to Abu Walid and Charles for taking the time to write their letters.
Thank you for this post. I was deeply moved by Charles’ letter, and I am gratified that Abu Walid respected it as well. I was also surprised to see that he has respect for Richard the Lionheart as well, considering all the jihadi rhetoric concerning contemporary “crusaders”. I don’t agree with all the comments in the letter, but it was nice to read.
By the way, for those using the Google Chrome web browser, it now automatically asks if you would like to see the Arabic language site translated into English. Those using other browsers can still see the Google translation by clicking on Language Tools on Google’s home page. Google has trouble with some languages, but the Arabic is surprisingly clear.