Reading those columns, I had to ask myself: “Why is the conversation about the Middle East always characterized by groups pointing fingers at each other?” One group produces a list of the excesses and abuses of the other group. The other group responds with indignation and draws up its own list. Soon, each side has an industry of abuse-watchers and list-producers.

But abuse-watching and list-producing industries have a funny way of developing a life of their own. They require the other side to be one-dimensional – evil. They seek examples of that evil, even hope for them. They begin to have undue influence over the larger community that birthed them. And they generate their own excesses.

Finally, people step in and say, “Hey, shouldn’t we have rules for how we criticize?”

Fine. I understand that rules are necessary. But I don’t want to spend my time debating how sharp people’s nails should be when they point fingers, or what angles are off limits, or how close to your face my finger can get before a foul is called.

Because the script for that play is already written. You can use whatever punctuation marks you want, but the conclusion is always the same - two groups frozen in a face-off; convincing themselves that only their people matter; hoping for the worst in the other; believing, after all these years, that you can win when someone else loses.

My faith – in Islam, in history, in humanity – teaches me that there is a different script. A script whose conclusion is concrete progress that improves people’s lives, not a list of rules for what counts as fair criticism. A script guided by the question, “How do we speak and act in a way that promotes the freedom, safety and dignity of all people?” A script where people express admiration for the highest principles in other traditions, and commit to living out the highest principles in their own.

This script depends on people who point to a new world and convince both sides that traveling there is better for everybody. Prophet Muhammad’s peaceful return to Mecca is a part of this script; the words of rabbis from Hillel to Heschel are included; South Africa’s Freedom Charter, written by Mandela’s African National Congress, is here.

And so is a shining moment in the Civil Rights movement. When the buses were finally desegregated at the end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott – a year where African-Americans walked to work, enduring everything from being fired to being beaten – Martin Luther King Jr. was asked what price he might exact, what revenge he might seek, from white people in Montgomery.

His response is the conclusion of the script of our common life together: “We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization … The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community.”