" ... At a time when political relations between Iran and the United States are so tense and the two nations are viewing each other with hostility and suspicion, it is important to remember that the cultural and literary relations between them have not always been so acrimonious. Also, at a time when religious fundamentalism has such a grip on the minds of a sizeable minority of American citizens and when the Religious Right and the bizarre concept of Christian Zionism exert such a powerful and largely negative influence on politics in the United States, it is refreshing to analyse the views of one of the most important American thinkers and writers on religious issues.
In a way, it is sad that nearly two hundred years after the age of great religious enlightenment in the United States, one has to restate these concepts again. However, it is important to know that the rich heritage of religious thinking in the United States itself contains the lofty ideas that can lift religion from its present sorry state and restore it to the more spiritual and universal status that is its true calling. Alternatively, Emerson's restatement of the rich spiritual heritage of Iranian mystics and poets can remind the Iranians that the present domination of fundamentalist ideology is an aberration of their long history and that they would do better to return to those loftier concepts. Above all, the Iranians and the Americans can come to realise that they share many common values and that they should not allow transient political considerations to undermine their common humanity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was the father figure of American literature and could justifiably be called the founder of the study of both comparative literature and comparative religion in the United States, and one of the greatest religious reformers that America has ever produced. The study of his religious thought charts the journey from a narrow and dogmatic religious outlook towards a mystical, universal outlook. If William Blake could be regarded as a British prophet, that title also belongs to Emerson in the United States. The study of Emerson's journey from Puritanism, towards Unitarianism, towards Transcendentalism and ultimately towards a universal religion of love and spirituality provides a powerful antidote to the narrow and fundamentalist interpretations of religion prevalent in both the East and the West today. ... "
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