picture in my mind

Why is there ikhtilaf, disagreement, conflict?

I understand it's so that we may be tolerant of one another. And higher than that, to be appreciative of those that make life tough for us.

When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. 

Jacob Riis