DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 28 November) – If there is anything I have learned from years of sitting in circles (whether academic, dialogue, or sometimes no-words spoken but circles still gathered under mango trees) it is this: stories are the first bridges we ever build.
So, when I recently got invited to be a panelist at the SALAAMindanao and Beyond 2025: Community of Practice on Peacebuilding through Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue among Southeast Asian Youth, something resonated with me again. As a destination itself, Davao City and the Island Garden City of Samal only hinted that this rendezvous was more pilgrimage than conferencing: an expedition inside other people’s worlds.
In that journey, one of the things I was most passionate about resurfaced. Storytelling and content creation.
After all, storytelling predates language, I would even dare to say. Before we had alphabets, we had charcoal. Before books, we had flames dancing around bonfires. Now, we have comics, films, podcasts, reels, and posts that vanish after twenty-four hours. But beneath all these shifting mediums, only one thing remains constant: story.
Everyone wants to hear a story.
Her own story.
Her people’s story.
Or the storyteller’s story that somehow mirrors her own fears, faith, and fragile hopes.
Neuroscience actually explains this ancient fascination. Our brain releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone, when we listen to a story and can cause us to feel connected with the narrator and her characters. At the same time, the brain’s mirror neurons are firing, allowing us to “experience” the story as if we’re inside it. And because the brain is wired to remember emotion more than fact, narratives bypass the gatekeepers of logic and distribute themselves comfortably, if not always exactly accurately, along memory lanes.
Simply put: the brain treats story as experience, not content.
No wonder religious scriptures in Southeast Asia are, to a great extent, books of stories. The Bible, the Qur’an, the Tipitaka, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and the Hikayat traditions of the Malay world not only legislate and command; they narrate, weave, evoke, and remind. Through their pages move prophets, sages, kings and queens, revolutionaries, poets, and peasants with a complex mixture of the sacred and the profane. From these stories, societies learned virtue long before they’d mastered vocabulary.
As a KAICIID Fellow, I always say that interreligious or intercultural dialogue is not an optional activity for me; it is part of my Islamic identity. In Islam, the Qur’an demands that we embark on ta‘aruf, which is “to know one another,” which first means that everyone has the courage to tell a story and second that each of us demonstrates humility before another.
So, my first work, before dialogue, plot or character, is understanding and facing my own story as fully and honestly as I can. How else can I offer it without fear or concealment?
This is the same advice I shared with the young Southeast Asian participants. “Before learning to tell your story,” I told them, “learn to enter it.”
As a columnist, storytelling for me is never an accessory; it is the spine. Look at some of my previous pieces:
* “A Muslim Tribute to a Pope Who Spoke Truth to Power”
* “A Muslim’s Decade-long Conversation with St. Ignatius”
* “Is ‘Terror’ Marawi’s Single Story?”
Various topics, various figures, and different histories but all are meaning journeys conveyed on the shoulders of story.
And that, maybe, is the secret magic of storytelling: it transforms content into connection and connection into community.
We bid adieu to the beautiful Samal after the sessions, and when it did, the sun had already started its easy fall with splashes of color just forming an arc: a young rainbow long before it speaks its promise into existence.
I turned to the young participants – Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, indigenous traditionalist, curious, and hopeful – standing by the shore with their notebooks, phones, cameras, and dreams.
What I saw was a rainbow of young storytellers all determined to get in deep, go inside their stories, and not just write them but gut themselves open with the work.
And once the story is understood, it is no longer a monologue. It becomes a dialogue. It becomes a shared light.
That, maybe, is how peace starts: not with a big treaty on a conference center stage but with the small determination of a young person who refuses to be told what she can’t do and then resolves that she will tell her story gently and sincerely while listening to your own.
#StorytellingforPeace #InterfaithDialogue #SALAAMindanao #SoutheastAsianYouth #KAICIID
[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mansoor L. Limba, PhD in International Relations and Shari‘ah Counselor-at-Law (SCL), is a publisher-writer, university professor, vlogger, chess trainer, and translator (from Persian into English and Filipino) with tens of written and translation works to his credit on such subjects as international politics, history, political philosophy, intra-faith and interfaith relations, cultural heritage, Islamic finance, jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalam), Qur’anic sciences and exegesis (tafsir), hadith, ethics, and mysticism. He can be reached at mlimba@diplomats.com and www.youtube.com/@WayfaringWithMansoor, and his books can be purchased at www.elzistyle.com and www.amazon.com/author/mansoorlimba.]