Page 417 - Cultures and Organizations

382 IMPLICATIONS

seen by the king; but this proposal he rejected with derision. He said that he
would appear before the Shah of Persia in the same dress he wore when before
his own sovereign.
— James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, 1824,
Chapter LXXVII

James J. Morier (1780–1849) was a European, and The Adventures of Hajji

Baba of Ispahan is a work of fiction. Morier, however, knew what he wrote
about. He was born and raised in Ottoman Turkey as a son of the Brit-
ish consul at Constantinople (now Istanbul). Later on he spent altogether
seven years as a British diplomat in Persia (present-day Iran). When Hajji
Baba was translated into Persian, the readers refused to believe that it had
been written by a foreigner. “Morier was by temperament an ideal traveler,
reveling in the surprising interests of strange lands and peoples, and gifted
with a humorous sympathy that enabled him to appreciate the motives
actuating persons entirely dissimilar to himself,” to quote the editor of the
1
1923 version of his book. Morier obviously read and spoke Turkish and
Persian. For all practical purposes he had become multicultural.

Intended Versus Unintended Intercultural Confl ict

Human history is composed of wars between cultural groups. Joseph
Campbell (1904–87), an American author on comparative mythology,
found the primitive myths of nonliterate peoples without exception affi rm-
ing and glorifying war. In the Old Testament, a holy book of both Judaism
and Christianity and a source document for the Muslim Koran, there are
numerous quotes like the following:

But in the cities of these people that the Lord your God gives you for
an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall
utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and
the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has
commanded.
—Deuteronomy 20:16–18

2

This is a religiously sanctified call for genocide. The fi fth commandment,
“Thou shalt not kill,” from the same Old Testament obviously applies only