Last week, as yet another tragic chapter unfolded in the intractable and ever-escalating Iran-Israel conflict, I found myself in the midst of conversations, intense, impassioned, and sometimes uncomfortably raw. The participants weren’t diplomats or scholars. They were ordinary people, men and women, brown and white, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, all fiercely devoted to their own perspectives, each convinced they were defending not merely an opinion but the truth.
One particularly striking exchange stood out. It was between two men: a Jordanian Muslim and a Nigerian Christian. The Jordanian, animated and seething with conviction, declared with unwavering finality that anyone supporting Israel’s military actions must be either ignorant or inhuman. “That’s the simple truth,” he insisted, as though all ambiguity had been resolved. His voice trembled with the weight of ancestral memory, of grief and disillusionment etched deep into his identity.
In contrast, the Nigerian, hailing from the country’s conflict-ridden North-Central region, saw the matter through a vastly different lens. To him, Israel’s actions were not only justified, they were essential. He saw in Israel’s defiance an echo of his own people’s struggle against extremist violence, often committed in the name of Islam. His reality was one of survival against forces that claimed to speak for a religion he now associated with chaos and pain.
These two men came from vastly different geographies, cultures, and histories, but both clung with equal fervor to what they believed was “the truth.” Intriguingly, neither was lying. Neither was necessarily wrong. But their conclusions, irreconcilable as they were, emerged from the unique contexts that shaped them. That moment brought to mind a statement often attributed to physicist Niels Bohr: “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth—just from a different perspective.”
A few years ago, I witnessed a similar dialogue between Michael, an American Christian, and Hasib, a Pakistani Muslim. Michael spoke with calm assurance: “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him.” For him, this wasn’t mere doctrine, it was the scaffolding of his spiritual existence.
Hasib, raised in a devout Muslim home, viewed Jesus (Isa) with profound respect, as one of Islam’s greatest prophets but ultimately believed that Muhammad was the final and most complete messenger of God.
Both men were thoughtful, sincere, and deeply committed. Yet, the convictions they so passionately upheld may have had less to do with reasoned choice than with geography and the accident of birth. Had Michael been born in Karachi and Hasib in rural Georgia, their spiritual worldviews might have looked quite different.
What we often call “truth” is not always the result of rigorous logic or divine revelation, but frequently the inheritance of place, language, and lineage, the stories and traditions passed down before we even learned to question them. In a world increasingly characterized by absolutism and ideological trench warfare, few questions are as pressing, or as discomforting as this: What is truth?
We inhabit a time of competing truths. Our conversations about religion, politics, morality, and identity are less about exchange and more about entrenchment. Each side, armored in its worldview, declares itself the sole custodian of righteousness. But what if truth isn’t monolithic? What if, more often than not, it’s fluid, shaped by our lived experiences, cultural environments, and emotional landscapes?