An argument can show that a thing is possible, but it takes an example to make people want it. Those who would turn a people away from a dark dream must show them a bright one that already exists, built by hands like their own. A single visible success persuades more young men than a library of refutations.
The Mass in the Desert
On the morning of the fifth of February 2019, the head of the Roman Catholic Church said Mass in a football stadium in Abu Dhabi.
No pope had ever before set foot on the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam. Francis had come at the invitation of the country's rulers. The stadium held forty-three thousand, and it had filled before dawn. Around it, in the car parks and the surrounding streets, a far larger crowd watched on screens. Estimates of the congregation ran from a hundred and thirty-five thousand to a hundred and eighty thousand. They were Filipino nurses and Indian engineers, Lebanese shopkeepers and Nigerian clerks, the migrant Christians of a Muslim country, and the government had given them the day off to attend.
An altar had been raised on the pitch with a large cross above it. Hymns were sung in Arabic, Tagalog, Malayalam, and Latin. Muslim officials of the state sat in the front rows.
The previous evening the Pope had appeared at a ceremony with the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, the highest authority in Sunni Islam. The two old men, one in white and one in black, signed a paper and then kissed each other on both cheeks.
The paper is called the Document on Human Fraternity. We resolutely declare, it says, that religions must never incite war, hateful attitudes, hostility and extremism. It affirms that freedom is the right of every person, and that each individual enjoys the freedom of belief, thought, expression, and action. It states that the pluralism and diversity of religions are willed by God in His wisdom. And it calls on believers to establish in their societies the concept of full citizenship, and to reject the discriminatory use of the term minorities.
The leader of Sunni Islam put his name to those sentences in an Arab capital, before the cameras of the world.
6 more minutes: The King's Map, The Country That Chose, Interpretation, The Method
Members read every case to the end and watch each film before release. The complete argument is also in the book.