Are We All Muslims?
The recent fiascos in social media channels about racism against Muslims is fascinating to observe. We have written in the past about the scientific basis for racism: there is none.
Let me quote from that post, because, once again, our society has fallen into the same rut of “us and them.” Here’s what we said before, and it holds true now, and always:
Beneath the skin, we are one of the most genetically similar of all species. In fact, research shows that, based on DNA analyses, ALL MEN descended from a common ancestor, the so-called “genetic Adam.” The only exception is an African-American man from South Carolina called Albert Perry, and his DNA suggests interbreeding between archaic and modern humans. Yes, humans. It’s who we all are.
Population geneticist Spencer Wells, a former fellow Stanford scholar who went on to write The Journey of Man, now heads the famous Genographic Project, which aims to trace the Y-chromosome and ancestral human migration out of Africa. His work beautifully highlights the fact that our DNA is a thread connecting all people around the world through history.
With this scientific evidence in mind, we can and should look for those golden threads that weave us all together, those attributes that make us similar, such as our physiology, our emotions, and our needs for acceptance, belonging, love, and happiness, rather than those that we have used so often to segregate and divide, such as skin color, religion, and race.
In short, we are all Muslims. And, black lives matter. Animal lives matter. And, wake up people, there is so much work to be done to nurture our world back to balance so that we, humans, can experience the win-win solutions that nature offers. Nature doesn’t need us; we need her. Let’s start behaving accordingly, by first respecting one another as unique and equally important, and then by cooperating to regenerate living systems that we have brought to the brink of collapse.