Until and unless a person comes out of the environment he lives in, he would never come to discover the beauties that are found in different environments in different parts of the world. There is present a specific community or group in our society who have enjoyed for many decades the prosperity being drawn from their successful businesses. The more they know about the world and its progress, the more they become confident and so bring more and more expansion in their business. This gallant trait has also been transferred to their children and one feels really surprised to see that a boy in his late teens is visiting a foreign country to make bulk purchases for the company or business organization of his father or family.

Many years ago, I read an interesting joke that described how people from different countries did not know about the people of the rest of the world. People from different countries were asked to give their opinion about a global problem of famine and malnutrition mostly grappling the poor nations of Asia and Africa. Some of the people did not know about famine, some did not know about the fact of malnutrition, and some did not know about the poor nations of Asia and Africa. It is also stated that American government knows too much about the countries of the world but majority of its population doesn’t know about different nations of the world and even its neighboring nations.

Anyhow, my aim of this explanation was to highlight the importance of knowledge and problems being created by ignorance. Ignorance or lack of knowledge narrows our mind and approach while it is a universal strategy of Sufis that meeting different people with varying behaviors and attitudes would broaden your horizon and make you more passionate and add good traits to your personality and behavior.

Having a look at the increase of differences among the people of different backgrounds like cultures, religious sects, races, colors and languages and its resultant complexities and problems is also an issue closely linked with the idea expressed above. For many centuries, we have lived with complete harmony, ignoring all the differences or even if the differences existed, we were good enough to accept and live with them but on many occasions, strange and rather painful attitude of people based on the differences mentioned earlier, brings in mind so many alarming consequences that may be born out of this inadvertent and heedless behavior.

A friend of mine came from a European country and among his numerous observations, an observation was really fascinating to me. He told that in the country he lived, there were people from almost all the corners of the world and they had all the differences between them. There, these differences are taken as normal and treated normally. In fact, such differences have added more beauty to the society. When the differences are treated in this manner, they not only close the doors of any kind of conflict but they also bring more maturity, vastness and broadness in the perceptions and attitudes of people. At the same time, they are more careful in not hurting the feelings of others and this concern and sensitivity is really a marvelous achievement because this has made every person a concerned and careful member of this heterogeneous society.

It doesn’t mean that all the developed countries and societies have completely solved all the problems stemming from the differences among its members. We repeatedly hear about the discriminations present in these societies as well and its recent example was the mistreatment of one of the richest and most powerful women of the world, Oprah Winfrey, in Switzerland where she was treated differently on the basis of her skin color.

Then we discussed about the problems arousing due to the differences among people and which are gradually increasing. Now, it is not a new or strange reality that people in Afghanistan attack and scolds the members or leaders of other groups on social networking sites. I have mentioned before as well that those leaders or elders who are dear to the masses of their group or community should be treated very gently and politely as a small insult may infuse a large scaled hatred among the large number of members of the both the communities and groups. Till now, these issues were being carried clandestinely but thanks to our negative utilization of useful social networking sites that this fire of differences is getting more fuel with every passing day. Almost a month ago, the debate of rather mentioning or not mentioning the ethnicities on national identity cards came as a fresh challenge to our collective social behaviors and unfortunately, we were not able to address this issue as finely as was needed. Talking on the issue, a parliamentarian used very impolite words against an ethnic group which started a fresh round of criticism from the members of both the groups and till recently, it was the most battled issue on Facebook and some other social networking sites. Keeping aside the impacts of social networking sites, people also got divided in their daily conversations and we witnessed some incidents of bitter disagreements. I am not here to judge the comments of the parliamentarian or give my opinion in the favor of any ethnic group but I am sure history will record it as a day when our mismanagement of the issue gave basis to even more severe drifting factors.

My friend was also surprised to see that how people were rigid in accepting the differences and how they reared these differences and made an issue to create problems to themselves. My assessment of the situation may seem to be a bit exaggerated to many but in one of my recent visits to in one of our neighbor countries, I witnessed how the hatred had engulfed the city resulting in the continuous genocide of a certain minority group based on ethnic and sectarian differences.

You might have yourself witnessed it or may have listened from others that those who traveled and observed other societies, there were some positive changes in their opinions regarding differences in people. Not only this, they learnt how it was important to be considerate about the feelings and emotions of others which resulted in the prevention of any kind of conflict, be it on a small or large scale. Our brothers and countrymen, who become too much violent and senseless about the differences among them, needs to be taken out of this limited scope environment so that they should see that how differences are dealt with and how the same differences can be turned into a positive power.

Though it is impossible to take all the Afghans abroad to make them witness the societies with harmony but we would definitely be able to promote any such feeling with the help of books, containing the stories of mutual and combined success and use the media as a platform to promote common grounds and assert the importance of unity among the different groups of society.