INTERNATIONAL

78
Proceedings of Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for International Scholars
Publication URL: http://www.phibetadelta.org/publications.php
Toleration to Sustain International Positive Relationship [1]
Mansoureh Sharifzadeh
Tehran, Iran
‘Toleration implies putting up with something that one disapproves of.’ …
“Toleration in modern parlance has been analyzed as a component of a liberal
or liberation view of human rights.”
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toleration
Toleration (sic) can bring the minds to the state of being ‘open to the criticism,’
while enhancing and upgrading rational judgment to avoid prejudice. One must bear
with criticism as God is the best to judge and the Bible reads, “Judge not, that you be not
judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure
you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s
eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother,
‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You
hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the
speck out of your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:1-5, The Bible, English Standard Version).
One of the most important advantages of cross cultural researches lays on the
fact that human communities come to a broader awareness about each other in spite of
the fundamental influence of the Media as a main stream in the domain of information.
With the rapid growth of technology and globalization, the people come to a deeper
understanding and acceptance of each other to avoid stereotypical fashion point of views.
Researches pave the path to open the minds to create a further comprehensible relationship
among the nations, although it goes through a complicated trend while making it
hard enough to enhance.
To open up the discussion, it is necessary for me to reflect on a few points
established to improve and open a new era in the relationship of the US and Iran. The
two countries have challenged each other over the past 35 years since the collapse of the
Pahlavi dynasty in 1978, and throughout over 50 years of the active presence of the US in
Iran.
On February 17, 2009, Prof. D. Ray Heisey (deceased May 20, 2011) invited
me to join him in a project on ‘how foreigners are perceived.’ The reason was that he had
been asked to give a talk at a monthly Lyceum Series by a local organization he was a
member of. In this regard, his main interest was to obtain Iranian and American teenagers’
ideas about each other through drawings. My response was positive and I asked my
students to draw their ideas about the American. The outcome was some drawings that
astonished me, as I never expected my students to do them so eagerly and skillfully.
On March 6, 2009, Dr. Heisey presented the drawings to the organization with
the title of “How We See Each Other.” The next day he wrote, “I was very pleased with
1 Editor’s Note: This paper was first presented at the Phi Beta Delta Annual Conference in April 2010,
Philadelphia, PA by Dr. Ray Heisey (now deceased). The co-author, Ms. Mansoureh Sharifzadeh, was unable
to attend. Subsequently, Ms. Sharifzadeh and the editor established contact, with the result that the presentation
was published in the Proceedings of Phi Beta Delta, Volume 2, Number 1, 2011. Those proceedings may be
found at the following URL: http://phibetadelta.org/images/stories/Docs/Proceedings/PROCEEDINGS-Vol-
2-No1-May-2011.pdf. This article is a follow up to that paper. Ms. Sharifzadeh asked the drawers their views
more than a year after the publication of the paper in the Proceedings. It must be noted that Iranian faculty and
students do not have the same kind of access to media and information as those in the West. Not all student
drawers responded, and not all drawing they made are represented below.