A personal essay by Holly Harrington
"We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race." -- Kofi Annan
I’ve always loved butterflies. Their iridescent wings whose colors shift in the sun as the light passes through their multi-layered surfaces. The way they flutter from one brightly colored flower to the next. Truly magnificent creatures. As a child, I could never understand why some of the butterflies looked predominantly orange, violet, or blue while others sported a plainer black or brown laced with streaks of color. Some butterflies flaunted vibrant colors on their inner wings, but when they landed, they shifted to an almost leaf-like appearance. Others still kept their bright colors regardless of whether they were flying or landed. Were they different species? If so, why did we call every variation of them butterflies? They had different colors which must have made them different species, right?
As I grew older, I learned that the variation in wing pigments came from melanin much like it does for humans. The amount and type of melanin released changes depending on the environment and what would allow the butterfly to best survive. Some butterflies, like the Julia longwing, retain an orange color to alert its predators that its distasteful and not good for consumption. Other butterflies, like the Heliconius, use the wing’s color patterns to find a suitable mate. It’s all based on survival.
Humans are much the same way. Our species originated in Africa where we were exposed to the blistering heat and dangerous UVB rays descending from the sun. To survive in these conditions, humans as a species eventually began producing larger quantities of melanin to both protect themselves from the sun and absorb vitamin D necessary for health. This naturally darkened their skin. When humans migrated north, they were less exposed to the sun creating a deficiency in vitamin D. To compensate for this loss, humans began creating vitamin D on their own after generations of natural selection. As a result, the skin paled since there was no need to protect against the sun when there were clouds constantly shrouding it. A natural deviation from their black-skinned ancestors. While they appear differently from each other, they’re still the same species.
I had never really considered the implications of humans looking differently when I was younger. Most of the people my family and I associated with also had our white skin and looked similar to us. The few people I knew who didn’t stood out vividly in my mind, but not necessarily in a bad way. They spoke the same language, they celebrated the same holidays, and they hailed from the United States just like me. We may have looked different, but there was a commonality I could find in them. It wasn’t until I was thrown into a world where I was the minority. Like a morpho butterfly stirring its blue wings amidst a sea of orange and black winged monarch butterflies.
A Memory from Oman
I was jostled awake as the car bounced over a long gravelly road that ran through what seemed to me a never-ending sea of sand varied occasionally with sloping hills and dusty gray houses blooming out of the ground. The monotonous desert would sometimes be dotted with the splotched fur of sheep lazily plodding beside the road while being led by a man with a red and white kufi wrapped around his head and a long white dishdasha.
“Isn’t this exciting!” My mom said as she looked out at the hot sands and glimpses of the murky blue ocean we were approaching.
Admittedly, my thirteen-year-old self wasn’t all that thrilled to be in a three-hour car ride squished between my aunt and my sister while my dad and grandpa rode in the car just behind us. Mom told me that we were headed towards a coastal area in Oman where they thought Bountiful—the place where the prophet Nephi and his family stayed before building a ship to sail to the Americas—was. I knew it was an important area for our religion, but that didn’t stop me from being bored out of my mind on the way there.
Our driver and guide, an Arab man named Abdullah, asked us, “Are you Mormons?”
My initial reaction was to freeze and to pretend like the man hadn’t said anything. I had gotten over my initial shock of arriving in the Middle East and being frightened by the curling, unintelligible letters of Arabic, the women so covered in black clothing that all I could see were their eyes, the harsh guttural sound of the language, and the terror that Arabs were going to kill me because I was a white American girl. That being said, I still felt nervous around all Arabs. They were so different from me, believed strange things that I couldn’t understand, and I’d heard about honor killings, the twin towers, and infidels. Besides, it was illegal to proselyte or talk about religions, so any time an Arab mentioned religion, I felt uncomfortable.
My mother—always the bold one—said that yes, we are.
It was here that I nervously waited for his response. What would he think? Our religion could seem so strange to other people. Not to mention that although we preached tolerance, our actual history didn’t always follow that. The church had denied the priesthood to the blacks based on a false belief that they were descendants of Cain—years of hate and denied blessings due to ignorance and blatant racism. Would Abdullah think our religion was just another white American religion that thought they were superior to other ethnicities?
“I’ve read your holy book: The Book of Mormon,” Abdullah continued.
I was surprised by this. Most Arabs didn’t know much if anything about Mormons, least of all the Book of Mormon. Again, I worried about what he’d think of it. About a family of Jews that fled to the Americas which God said was the promised land. There’s racism within the Book of Mormon as well. Margaret Hemming and Fatimah Salleh point out in their article “Wrestling with the Racism of the Book of Mormon” that Nephi describes his brothers being cursed by God so that their skins were blackened which made them stand apart from their white brothers who were the blessed and holy ones. Despite the Book of Mormon’s claim that all people, regardless of skin color or gender, were alike unto God, many of the Prophets in the Book of Mormon didn’t necessarily follow their own deity’s standards. Would Abdullah think we thought less of people who produced more melanin than ourselves? People like him whose skin is all tan and coppery.
Again, I felt nervous, scared. Arab Muslims are just so different. Would he be mad? Would he think we were infidels? How could he not be angry? He’s a Muslim, we’re Christian, he’s an Arab, we’re Americans, he looks and thinks differently from us.
“I told my father-in-law about your religion, and when I mentioned that you practiced polygamy he said: now that’s a true religion!” After saying this, Abdullah just laughed and continued to explain that he’d studied all about our religion and knew about Joseph Smith, Nephi, and a lot of our beliefs.
Something inside me clicked at that moment. The moment when he mentioned polygamy, something that made our religion stand out badly and was severely criticized, was seen as something good in the eyes of a traditional practicing Muslim. It was then that I could finally start seeing that Muslims and Mormons had lots of similarities—Muslims didn’t drink alcohol, neither did we. Although we can eat pork, we’re no strangers to having restrictions on our diet. They fast during the month of Ramadan and we fast every first Sunday. They make a pilgrimage to Mecca since it is a holy place much like we make our own journeys to the temple to receive our endowments. They have conservative views on clothing, family, conduct, and chastity much the same way we do compared to most Westerners. Even the things that we don’t like—polygamy and the fact that many Christian sects don’t recognize us as Christians—link our religions together. Maybe we aren’t quite as different as I had originally thought.
We may look different, speak different languages, and have different cultures and religions, but at our heart and core, we are the same. Art and religion may be manifested in a form different from my own, but it still displays both a celebration of life and a hope for a better life to come. We value our families and want to provide the best for both ourselves and the people we love. We both love and have been loved in return.
All butterflies have six legs, antennas, and three body segments. They flit from flower to flower and gather nectar from them to provide sustenance necessary for survival. They all fly and seek out mates. Despite the different environments they live in and outward exterior they may exude, they are still butterflies with the same necessities in life. Humans are no different. They may look and live according to a different set of principles and melanin levels, but biologically and emotionally they are still human. Humans who, when you get down to their very core values and center, aren’t all that different from each other.
Image Credit:
Escape in the Mountains, Oman Katerina Kerdi
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