Continue reading »]]> by MATTHEW NASH – Sequim Gazette
Jan 25, 2012
In an effort to bridge the gap of religious differences in America, the Interfaith Amigos are creating fresh dialogue across the country and soon will open up a conversation in Sequim.

Three compadres from Christian, Jewish and Islamic backgrounds — the Rev. Don Mackenzie, Rabbi Ted Falcon and Imam Jamal Rahman — visit Trinity United Methodist Church on Jan. 29 for an afternoon of discussion and exploration of faith.

Soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the men began meeting weekly to discuss a better way of creating perceptions among faiths, particularly of Islam. In 10-plus years, their friendship blossomed into a radio show, two books together, visits to the Middle East and touring with their presentation.

Mackenzie said even with their different backgrounds, they get along great.

“It’s deepening our individual faiths as well as an understanding of our shared spirituality,” Mackenzie said.

Their work isn’t competitive but cooperative, Rahman said.

“It proves the point that we make, interfaith is not about conversion but about completion,” Rahman said. “As I learn more about Christianity and the Jewish faith, it waters my roots.”

Falcon said they’ve met countless people who radically disagree with their ideologies.

“First thing we want to tell them is thank you for their willingness to disagree with us,” Falcon said. “We want to reframe it … We don’t want to change (their) approach.”

In their presentation and books they discuss how they open dialogue across faiths and denominations.
Rahman said personal relationships with people of other faiths is essential and once established can begin collaboration on issues like social justice and the environment.

“We’ve been able to expand dialogue that ideally helps people create that dialogue in their own communities,” Falcon said.

In one city they discovered an interfaith group that had met for eight years but didn’t speak publicly until after the Amigos’ presentation.

Touring the nation, most of their audiences are Christian communities like Sequim.

Falcon said issues are not just interfaith but intrafaith: They encourage people to talk within their own faiths and denominations. Churches of all kinds have welcomed them.

“Their willingness is encouraging,” Rahman said. “The question of interfaith, it’s not a matter of a nice thing. It’s a matter of survival. It’s essential that we do this dialogue.”

One of the most common questions they receive is why other faiths aren’t included.

Mackenzie said religious struggles are among Christians, Jews and Muslims, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict and America’s Muslim phobia.

“If we three religions could learn to live with each other, we could change the environment we live in,” Mackenzie said.

Following a research poll about building a mosque at Ground Zero in New York City, 37 percent were in favor of building it. Rahman said those 37 percent each knew at least one Muslim person whereas those against building did not know a Muslim.

Falcon said traditionally attendees find not only a deeper understanding of other faiths, but of their own.

They encourage questions and those who disagree to attend, as well.

“Every once in a while, we get an unexpected question,” Mackenzie said. “The more challenging the question the more we end up learning.”

For free tickets, call Trinity United Methodist Church at 683-5367.

Reach Matthew Nash at mnash@sequimgazette.com.

source: http://www.sequimgazette.com/news/article.exm/2012-01-25_a_peaceful_path_among_three_faiths

Continue reading »]]> By SAMAR FATANY
Jan 22, 2012
Let us establish business partnerships and support joint projects between faith-based organizations

Exploring what the Abrahamic faiths have in common was the theme of an interfaith dialogue held in Atlanta’s All Saints Episcopal Church on the sidelines of the recent US-Saudi Business Opportunities Forum. The Saudi Committee of International Trade (CIT) and the Saudi-US Trade Group organized the event.

The discussion was moderated by Nick Stuart, president of Odyssey Networks, America’s largest interfaith media organization. The American panelists were prominent religious leaders in Atlanta; the southeast regional director of Anti-Defamation League, president of the Concerned Black Clergy, president of the Alliance for Christian Media, and dean of the Chapel and Religious Life at Emory University. Saudi participants included senior members of the CIT.

The dialogue focused on two major global concerns of this century — poverty and the environment. The discussion was very informative, and the participants exchanged their valuable experiences in dealing with these two realities that are threatening our world. They debated the theological aspects of the three religions and shared the actual spiritual practices in their daily lives that reinforce the commonalities of Abrahamic beliefs.

The dialogue ended with five recommendations for future interfaith projects: The need to build trust, address issues with open transparency, acquire knowledge and understanding of the other faiths, and to come up with joint projects that can serve their communities and tackle common issues of major concern.

Meanwhile, the outreach program succeeded in connecting the Saudi business leaders with the Odyssey Media Networks, which supplies videos of interfaith news stories to CNN, Huffington Post and a number of websites run by hosts such as AOL. It has its own website and mobile app, Call on Faith (available at i-Phone and BlackBerry app stores), which carries 18 short-form video channels. One of the main contributions is providing weekly links to churches to help preachers prepare for their weekly sermons, linking faith to the weekly events that are uppermost in the lives of the faithful, such as news about the economy, the environment, poverty and how we treat each other.

One of the objectives of Odyssey Networks is to launch a similar service for Muslims in America to aid preaching and study in the mosques and linking the insights from the Qur’an and the Hadith to topical news stories. Muslim organizations need to reach out and connect with such sincere interfaith efforts to foster better understanding between Muslims and other faiths.

Indeed the Saudis could learn a lot from their experience and adapt some of their programs to promote the role of the mosque and make it more effective by providing realistic guidance for the faithful.

Muslim organizations certainly could learn from such experiences in order to provide proper interpretations of the Qur’an and follow the authenticated Sunnah that relates more to the realities of our time in order to address the challenges of the 21st century.

There are many other ways in which we can benefit from establishing links with more-experienced interfaith organizations. One of them is encouraging Muslims to reach out and interact with other faiths and engage in dialogue to correct distorted information that has harmed Muslims and has given Islam a bad name. Odyssey is trying to grow its Muslim membership, and they are interested in appointing a Muslim board member who could contribute by providing firsthand information about the true principles of Islam and give a Muslim perspective on current issues of global concern. Other initiatives could include an internship or sponsored Muslim video journalist who would join the production staff for a few months to interact with other professionals and learn from their experience to cover stories from the Muslim world that would provide a more accurate picture of Muslim culture and way of life.

Talented Muslims in this field could introduce Muslim insights to the production team, whether it be new media, Web expertise, graphic design or video journalists and editors.

We need to support such initiatives to build trust and eliminate the elements of fear and suspicion that have divided Abrahamic faiths. Let us establish business partnerships and support joint projects between faith-based organizations to address global challenges like poverty or the environment and other pressing issues that threaten humanity.

Muslim organizations in Saudi Arabia that support Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah’s initiative of interfaith dialogue need to seek interfaith initiatives emerging out of the US like the Odyssey Networks and find ways to link up to highlight Muslim contributions to provide a positive perspective that promotes peace and harmony.

The outreach program initiated by the CIT to promote an interfaith dialogue with Saudi Arabia could be the beginning of a strong partnership to foster better relations with the West and a chance to find common ground between the Abrahamic faiths. Investment in such initiatives would contribute to global peace and prosperity.

— Samar Fatany is a Saudi radio journalist. She can be reached at samarfatany@hotmail.com.

source: http://arabnews.com/opinion/columns/article566344.ece

Continue reading »]]> Saturday, December 31, 2011

LAHORE

AN NGO held a three-day Interfaith Harmony Camp at St Anthony’s High School, Lawrence Road, Lahore.

The camp was aimed at enabling young students of three religions to develop mutual understanding and trust among each other. A group of 60 students aged 14-16 years from Muslim, Christian and Sikh religions participated in the camp.

“Through this, we hope to promote a sense of harmony, tolerance, co-existence and respect in these young minds”, said Tooba Fatima, the camp manager.

The students from 14 private and government schools of Lahore and one school of Nankana Sahib participated in the camp, attending various creative and educational activities. The participants played team games and met group challenges while dialogues were held among them which explored the similarities among all religions.

During the dialogues sessions, the students explored the similarities among all religions and used some time to share basic values, customs and celebrations that each religion holds as important.

The acting Consulate General of the US Consulate, Lahore, Ted Gehr and Public Affairs Officer Brinille Ellis distributed the certificates of participation among the campers and appreciated the efforts of the NGO for promoting peace.

Sajjad Ahmad, country director of the NGO, thanked the audiences, their parents and the young members of the organization to create this opportunity for the students who rarely had such an opportunity in their lives to spend three days together.

source: http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=85011&Cat=5&dt=12/31/2011

Continue reading »]]> by Judith Sudilovsky
3 January 2012

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Jerusalem (ENInews). Pilgrims to the Holy Land who are searching for the roots of Christianity can also gain a surprisingly rich understanding of other religions, according to a prominent Franciscan clergyman.

“A pilgrim does not come to the Holy Land to understand politics or to understand the geography. First and foremost he is a religious pilgrim,” said Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, whose formal title is Custodian of the Holy Land and who is the head of all Franciscans in the region. “But of course when they come here as Christians they are exposed to the understanding and the presence of other Christians … and understand what ecumenical dialogue is and why it is so important.”

He spoke at a two-day interfaith conference on pilgrimage held from 28 to 29 December in Jerusalem, sponsored by the Israel-based Elijah Interfaith Institute and the Swiss-based Lasalle-Haus, also an interfaith organization.

Pilgrims are also exposed, sometimes for the first time, to Jews and Muslims living within their own context, he said. “An encounter with Jesus can’t be separated from an encounter with the people of different religions (in this land),” he said.

Modern-day pilgrim Franz Mali, a 51-year-old Austrian professor living in Switzerland, undertook a seven-month hiking pilgrimage to the Holy Land that started in Switzerland and wound through Italy, Austria, eastern Europe, Turkey, Syria and Jordan. The trip gave him a new view of the many Muslim migrant workers from Turkey and Syria living in Switzerland.

“(The migrant workers) were always strangers to me,” said Mali. “But now I have had this experience (with them in their own countries) and they were so nice and friendly and now I have an idea of how friendly they can be. My attachment to foreigners inside Switzerland, and Islam, will be completely different as a result.”

Jesuit priest Christian Rutishauser, program director of Lassalle-Haus who also participated in the seven-month pilgrimage, emphasized the importance of walking for spiritual deepening. “Not only does it deepen your own faith, it broadens your world view,” he said.

Although the group was not able to recruit Muslims or Jews to this year’s journey, Rutishauser envisioned a trip where pilgrims of different faiths might learn from each other’s sacred texts. A dialogue in this context, he said, would be less confrontational then sitting around a table.

Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein, founder and director of the Elijah Institute, noted that pilgrimages carry eternal lessons. “The spirit which defined the pilgrimages by foot of centuries past remains in our world today as a source of inspiration and hope,” he said.

Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowicz, rabbi of the Western Wall, noted that a pilgrim must rise above self- interest.

“A pilgrimage is not just physical but it is also an intent to separate from your personal thoughts and to look upward,” he said, noting that he welcomed prayers from all pilgrims in Jerusalem and urged all pilgrims to behave respectfully not only in their holy places but also in the holy places of other faiths.

Muslim speakers at the conference included Moroccan poet and peace activist Abel Damoussi and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, of the Cordoba Initiative in New York, a multi-faith organization.

source: http://www.eni.ch/featured/article.php?id=5382

Continue reading »]]> Dec. 23, 2011

NEW YORK, NY, Dec 23, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Stephen Wise Free Synagogue convenes 16 senior religious leaders from New York City to promote peace and understanding through a first of its kind mission to Israel. The program is intended to create and broadcast a positive model of interfaith relations based on mutual acceptance and tolerance. Spearheading this initiative is Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, senior Rabbi at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue.

During the intensive six-day trip the clergy will visit the holiest sites of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and together address challenges to peaceful coexistence. Among the leaders they anticipate meeting with are: Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel; Salam Fayyad, Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority; Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority; Shimon Peres, President of Israel; Natan Sharansky, former refusenik and Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel; Nir Barkat, Mayor of Jerusalem, and David Buskila, Mayor of Sderot. In addition the delegation is scheduled to meet the mayor of Bethlehem and the leadership of the neighboring settlement of Efrat in order to gain a better understanding of the reality on the ground.

“There is an urgent need to counter the impression that our three great faiths are at war with each other,” said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. “We believe in a better way: the way of dialogue and mutual respect. We hope that our visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories will emphasize our common aspiration for, and commitment to, a more peaceful world. We are eager to meet and encourage Israelis and Palestinians who are working daily to realize this aspiration.”

The religious leaders head 15 historic institutions and collectively represent tens of thousands of New Yorkers. The participants are Sheikh Dr. Ibrahim Abdul-Malik, Admiral Family Circle Islamic Community; Reverend Stephen Bauman, Christ Church; Reverend Shari Brink, Marble Collegiate Church; Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein, B’nai Jeshurun Congregation; Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, Park Avenue Synagogue;

Rabbi Linda Henry Goodman, Union Temple of Brooklyn; Reverend Galen Guengerich, All Souls Unitarian Church; Imam Dr. Muhammad Hatim, Admiral Family Circle Islamic Community; Reverend Dr. William Heisley, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church; Reverend Brenda Husson, St. James Episcopal Church; Reverend Dr. James Kowalski, Cathedral Church St. John the Divine; Reverend Stephen Phelps, The Riverside Church; Father Robert Robbins, Church of the Holy Family at the United Nations Parish; Rabbi Peter Rubinstein, Central Synagogue; Rabbi Jonathan Stein, Temple Shaaray Tefila; led by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, Stephen Wise Free Synagogue.

About Stephen Wise Free Synagogue: Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is a beacon of progressive Jewish thought, inclusive worship, and committed social action for our congregants, our neighbors, and the larger community. We manifest the central Jewish ideal of tikkun olam (repairing the world) through such programs as our onsite Men’s Shelter and Emergency Food Program. The synagogue embraces the central Jewish value espoused by its founder, Stephen Wise, to support the State of Israel and further the unity of the Jewish people worldwide. To learn more, visit www.swfs.org .

source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jewish-christian-and-muslim-senior-religious-leaders-come-together-for-an-unprecedented-interfaith-mission-to-israel-led-by-rabbi-ammiel-hirsch-of-stephen-wise-free-synagogue-2011-12-23

Continue reading »]]> by Kate Shellnutt -Houston Chronicles
December 21, 2011

On Christmas Eve, Jews and Muslims may find themselves with nothing to do while Christian neighbors plan fancy dinners and special church services.

For the past two years, the Jewish and Muslim communities in Houston have taken advantage of their free schedules to gather together to learn about each others’ traditions and find commonalities as minority faiths.

“We’re doing it on an evening when we feel a little out of place,” said Rabbi Steve Gross, of the Houston Congregation for Reform Judaism. “Not that we have anything against Christmas and all the hoopla around it, it’s just that during this time of year we are acutely aware of own religious identity and that our celebration is different.”

The 50-person event, to be held at Masjid at-Taqwa in Sugar Land this year, is one of only a few examples programming that draws Jews and Muslims together around Christmas.

“I think it’s amazing we use Christmas as a platform for Jews and Muslims to get together,” said Shariq Ghani, a Muslim community leader helping to organize the event. “It shows solidarity as Abrahamic faiths.”

During the event, Muslims will pray their evening prayers, like they do every night, and Jews will light a menorah for the fifth night of Hanukkah.

In smaller groups, the participants will discuss their traditions and stereotyping, over a meal of latkes and Pakistani treats.

Though the two faith traditions may have political and religious differences, “it’s difficult to hate people who have a name and a face and talk to you and cook good food,” said Ghani.

Gross and Ghani, the president of Crescent Youth, met through an interfaith program and came up with the idea for a Christmas Eve event last year. The two communities met at a synagogue for the inaugural event, where they introduced each other to their faith’s practices.

For nearly all of the Muslims, it was the first time they’d been in a synagogue; for the Jews, the first time they’d spoken in-depth with a follower of Islam, Ghani said. And yet, the event was a success. Blogger Jill Carroll covered the event in her post “Have Yourself a Merry Muslim-Jewish Sabbath Christmas Eve.”

This year, Gross and Ghani have planned several follow-up community service activities and youth programs to keep the interaction going beyond their Dec. 24 meetup.

Gross said that yes, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are when most Jewish families will eat Chinese and go to the movies. Ghani said his family does barbeque.

Although Islam recognizes Jesus as an “all-star prophet,” Muslim families don’t celebrate Christmas and usually skip the secular side of the holiday, too.

“I grew up believing in Santa and asking my mom, ‘Why doesn’t Santa come to my house?’ Once I learned more about Islam, I knew why,” said Ghani, a native of Fort Bend. “The youth today have a greater understanding of the different traditions of the faiths.”

Despite the religious diversity in the Houston area, interfaith relations aren’t perfect. The regional chapter of the Anti-Defamation League continues to collect reports of slurs and discriminatory remarks against Jews and other groups. Muslims in Houston face mosque vandalism and violence.

Organizers of the Christmas Eve event see their participants going beyond surface-level dialogue to really enrich relations on behalf of Jews and Muslims across the city.

“Usually you hear about Muslims and Jews at odds with each other, but here’s an example of us coming together for good,” Gross said.

source: http://blog.chron.com/believeitornot/2011/12/christmas-eve-brings-together-houston-jews-muslims

Continue reading »]]> By Osama Eshera
Monday, December 5, 2011

Last month, I took part in a series of interfaith events at this university in which Jewish students joined their Muslim counterparts at Friday Prayer, and the Muslim students attended Kabbalat Shabbat in the evening. It was, for me, the first interfaith event of its kind and left me with a single looming question — what does interfaith really mean?
Most other interfaith events I’ve been to in college were of one general form — a bunch of people from different faith communities sitting in a room and engaging in a general discussion on faith and its practice. The vast majority of these discussions focus on highlighting similarities between different traditions — that all humans are created equal before God and our beliefs are founded on love and service.
We attempt to present our faiths as ordered houses that fit perfectly together. We spend more time reinforcing the glorified ideals of pluralism, tolerance and dialogue than actually working toward them. In doing so, we produce little more than artificial consensus between the present individuals and fail to build bridges between our communities.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing negative about affirming our commonalities; in fact, that really is step one to better understanding. But it’s exactly that — the first step. In order for interfaith events to be effective, we need to move beyond the artificial and into the substantial. We need to dig a bit below the surface and be willing to talk through our differences so we can actually understand each other.
When we do this, discussions can further our own personal growth and prove to be powerful religious experiences in their own right. Interfaith discussions should not leave attendees singing “Kumbaya,” but should bring participants’ hearts together by helping them better understand themselves and their own religious beliefs.
By far the most influential experience I’ve had in this context was attending the Kabbalat Shabbat at Hillel. Being in the midst of the Jewish community’s comfort zone during their prayer allowed me to learn so much that is implicit in their tradition — things they probably could not articulate, things you can only learn through immersion. I am certain the Jewish students would say the same about attending the Muslim Friday Prayer.
What I also found quite revealing was the discussion we had after the services. Rather than an open-ended conversation on morals and ideals, the discussion was based on a textual comparison of verses from Jewish and Muslim scriptures. We were able to have a meaningful discussion that moved beyond our similarities and brought our differences to light in a way that really humanized each tradition. We shared our passions, customs and differing worldviews. We challenged one another’s texts in a way that leads to our collective spiritual growth.
As the dialogue developed, we kept inching toward a particular idea that seemed a bit taboo. Implicit in the fact we observe different religions is a sense of exceptionalism: We inherently have some beliefs and practices that are exclusive to our traditions. And though such a conviction is only natural, its expression is often avoided during interfaith dialogues. But when we are able to embrace the uniqueness of one another’s beliefs without temperance or remorse, we experience a sense of liberation that can truly bind our communities together.
Interfaith discussions can lead to powerful internal and external change. We need not trivialize these conversations as a search for our lowest common denominator. Instead, we should find the strength to crystallize who we are, what we believe and how we are, in fact, different. Without such a sincere effort, our dialogues will be nothing more than empty rhetoric.
Osama Eshera is a junior bioengineering major. He can be reached at eshera@umdbk.com.

source: http://www.diamondbackonline.com/opinion/understanding-interfaith-connections-1.2725629#.Tt-z9bLNnXF

Continue reading »]]> by Carin Buckman, Beth El Temple,
2011-11-28

Why should Jews engage in dialogue and establish relationships with Christians and Muslims? What are the benefits and risks of such engagement? Find out the answers to these and other fascinating questions as Professor Yehezkel Landau, the Director of the interfaith training program for Jews, Christians and Muslims called “Building Abrahamic Partnerships” at the Hartford Seminary, shares his experience over many years, both in Israel and the U.S., on Saturday, December 3.

Services begin at 9:30 a.m. In Part I, Professor Landau will include references to Torah texts, and a luncheon and question-and-answer session will follow.

Part II of the Interfaith Dialogue will be two weeks later on Saturday, December 17.

In this session, Professor Landau will address how Jews can fruitfully engage Christians and Muslims. How can controversial issues be broached without undermining trust and good will? Professor Landau will discuss the needed skills and sensitivities with examples of initiatives that have worked. Services again begin at 9:30 a.m. and Professor Landau will be speaking from the bima. Ample time for discussion will follow after Kiddush.

After earning an A.B. from Harvard and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, Professor Landau made aliyah to Israel in 1978. A dual Israeli-American citizen, his work has been in the fields of interfaith education and Jewish-Arab peacemaking. This past August he helped organize the first iftar (the evening meal when Muslims break their fast during Ramadan) at the home of the Israeli ambassador to the United States (Michael Oren) in Washington, D.C., attended by more than sixty Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders.

This two part program, co-sponsored by Beth El Temple and the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford Jewish Community Relations Council, is open to the entire community and all are welcome. For more information please call 860-233-9696 or visit the Beth El website at www.bethelwesthartford.org.

Beth El Temple is an egalitarian congregation affiliated with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. The synagogue strives to create, sustain and strengthen Jewish unity and continuity through personal involvement in meaningful worship, ritual, learning and social action. All are welcome. Located at 2626 Albany Avenue in West Hartford, Beth El is home to worshippers who live in more than a dozen Central Connecticut cities. For more information, please contact Beth El at (860) 233-9696, on the web at www.bethelwesthartford.org or friend us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/bethelwh.

source: http://www.courant.com/community/hc-community-articleresults,0,5942637,results.formprofile?Query=54101HC

Continue reading »]]> -THE OTTAWACITIZEN.com

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

Rev. RAY INNEN PARCHELO is a novice Tendai priest and founder of the Red Maple Sangha, the first lay Buddhist community in Eastern Ontario.

It hasn’t always been fashionable to consider seriously faiths other than one’s own. My co-worker remembers telling a friend and church-mate that she was soon to marry but not in their small-town church. In total surprise, the friend asked of the groom, “Well, what is he then?” In their one-church community, it seemed unimaginable that someone might worship elsewhere. Now, in our increasingly diverse nation, we are all usually members of one or another minority faith, and “What is he?” is more often the default question.

The Christian-Buddhist dialogue movement has grown over the past few decades, as these different faiths recognize the benefit of learning from each other. In Buddhism and Christianity in Dialogue, Perry Schmidt-Leukel proposes three phases of interfaith engagement. At the lowest and least useful level, the one most like adolescent high-school debates, each side presents their faith. They analyse, criticize and challenge (even mock or condemn) the other, trying to prove how their faith is vastly superior. Claims of superior logic on one hand or supreme power of one’s “book” on the other, keeps both sides from really learning much. The next level is where the mocking or combative element disappears and there is some attempt to learn, but always from the safe assumption that “my faith is the true one.” This is mere tolerance. The third and most useful kind of interfaith dialogue is open to gaining new insights about one`s own faith by practising and studying with others in their faith. This Schmidt-Leukel describes as “the challenge of mutual transformation.”

Interfaith dialogue will improve when the participants in that dialogue move beyond self-promotion and self-defence. The entire project of faith activity is one of opening ourselves up to new and deeper understandings, and in that there can be little room for the kind of smug defensiveness or bitter attacks that hobble too many contemporary interfaith endeavours. Doubt, risk, open investigation at the intellectual level and sincere, respectful sharing at the spiritual level belong in religious dialogue. A closed mind and a closed heart are signs of spiritual stagnation, not vitality.

Rev. GEOFFREY KERSLAKE is a priest of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Ottawa.

Genuine interfaith dialogue hinges on respecting the freedom of the participants to hold their respective beliefs. It is not about trying to synthesize a “common religion” out of the beliefs of different communities because to have a genuine dialogue everyone must be prepared to respect each community’s teachings. Interfaith dialogue fails when participants try to use it as an opportunity to “convert” their dialogue partners. In 1984, Professor Leonard Swidler of Temple University wrote an article in which he outlined “Ten Commandments” of interfaith dialogue. The first rule gives a foundation upon which to have productive dialogue: “The primary purpose of dialogue is to learn; that is, to change and grow in the perception and understanding of reality, and then to act accordingly” (Journal of Ecumenical Studies 20:1, 1984). Each of his remaining commandments highlights the need for mutual respect and a genuine desire to learn from each other without an ulterior motive. In areas of the world where one faith is endorsed as the sole state religion and where other faiths are persecuted or repressed, there is little possibility for dialogue or interfaith understanding and respect. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us “the right to the exercise of freedom, especially in moral and religious matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of the human person” (CCC n. 1738). To improve interfaith dialogue we need to recognize the fundamental human right to freedom of religion and we must pray for the grace to encourage honesty, mutual respect and a genuine desire to learn from one another about our respective beliefs.

ABDUL RASHID is a member of the Ottawa Muslim community, the Christian-Muslim Dialogue and the Capital Region Interfaith Council.

The Creator of humanity blessed it with the unique faculty of speech (Holy Qur’ãn, 55:4). It provides us with the ability to talk, explain our points of view to each other and understand our differences and commonalities. This is what the various forms of interfaith dialogues across the world are engaged in.

There are regular meetings and dialogues taking place between various faith groups at the local, regional and international levels. Canada can take pride in the establishment of an Interfaith Parliamentary Friendship Group. It holds an annual breakfast in which members of various faith groups, diplomatic corps and Parliament take part. Our City is rich in promoting several interfaith groups. Just last month, there was an interfaith prayer service where 17 faith groups participated.

The Holy Qur’ãn informs us that human diversity is Divinely-ordained (30:22). And, in respect of differences of faith and belief, the Qur’ãn tells us that “if God had so willed, He would have made you a single people but (His Plan is) to test in what He has given you: so strive as in a race in all virtues” (5:51).

The various faith groups, while loyal to their own faith teachings, have found a common core. When we study the scriptures of different faiths, we find that the conceptual framework underlying them is, if not identical, very similar. All human beings are the creation of the same God and we all share responsibility to provide care to them irrespective of colour, caste or creed.

Our world has become global, which is the common abode of human family. The members of this family must interact and talk. Interfaith dialogues increase mutual recognition, understanding and respect.

KEVIN SMITH is on the board of directors for the centre for Inquiry, Canada’s premier venue for humanists, skeptics and freethinkers.

Within 30 seconds of attending my first interfaith discussion, I made a faux pas. It was the first time I had entered a mosque, which provided my red-faced excuse. Entering the prayer space, I beetled over to sit on the closest chair. I immediately noticed not only that my row was dominated by women, but also a backward glance revealed the whole section was female — and they were looking at me as if I were a freak. I had forgotten the Islamic gender thing.

Uncomfortably seated in my proper place, I listened to the argument — Does God Exist? The table was weighted: three Abrahamic religions to one lone infidel perched on the end.

After the God side won, the assembled crowd continued the debate over sweets and coffee. I became a curiosity once I spoke of my atheism. The sparring was friendly, if not tiresome; thank God and Allah.

One subject arose which could be a key to improving dialogue between the faiths and faithless; at least it was for us that evening. We talked hats. I pointed out to some of the younger group that their kufis — after being corrected for yet another slip — were beautiful with their unique patterns and colours. This led us down a path of engaging, faith-free discussions. We had connected.

As the reception winded down, one of my new friends threw me a humorous dig for rejecting his God, and I tossed one right back at him. We laughed at our playful teasing, accepting that what divides us is of less importance than the respect we had gained for each other.

With that we shook hands and went on our separate ways, seeking answers to the big questions of life.

Read the full article: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Religion+Experts+improve+interfaith+dialogue/5774502/story.html#ixzz1eynOcDeV

Continue reading »]]> by RICHARD LLOYD
November 24, 2011

Over the past 18 months, Middle Tennessee has been thrust uncomfortably into the spotlight of national debates about the place of Islam in American society, owing to controversies over the proposed Islamic Center in Murfreesboro and proposed state legislation outlawing the practice of Sharia law. Not surprisingly, disproportionate attention has been paid to right-wing groups like the Tennessee Freedom Coalition and ACT America, with their sexy apocalyptic rhetoric of a clash of civilizations — this despite the fact that their agenda has been consistently routed in the local courts and publicly drubbed whenever it has surfaced in the General Assembly.

Yet even among the vast majority of the populace that favors religious freedom over extremists on all sides, legitimate concerns remain, whether they’re Christians concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, Jews troubled by perpetual hostilities in the Middle East, or American Muslims worried that their patriotism and right to worship are coming under attack. As sign-wavers and slogan-shouters dominate the headlines, the chance of a neutral middle ground where people of different, perhaps even conflicting faiths can openly address these issues has become more difficult. Which made a gathering last week at the West End United Methodist Church all the more noteworthy, as leaders from Nashville’s Muslim, Jewish and Christian faith communities set out to find light where others have supplied mostly heat.

The event was titled “Family of Abraham — Toward a Common Vision.” The program featured Sayyid M. Syeed of the Islamic Center of North America, with responses from Rabbi Daniel Levitt of Congregation Sherith Israel and the Rev. Becca Stevens of Vanderbilt’s St. Augustine Chapel. Had they all walked into a bar, the panel might have served as the setup for a joke — but this was not something the audience had heard before. By evening’s end, the discussion had ventured into areas that clearly made people uneasy, especially tensions between American Jews and Muslims. Yet people left with the sense that doors for understanding — or at least dialogue — had been opened, not shut.

This was the second “Family of Abraham” event, the first held on July 13 in the auditorium of the University School and featuring keynote Mark Pelavin, of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, with opening remarks by Mayor Karl Dean. Both events had ecumenical representation including local Christian leaders: Stevens in November, and Father Joe Breen and the Rev. Sonnye Dixon last July. The events originated in a narrower dialogue within a Nashville-area group of Muslims and Jews — the Circle of Friends — using a text prepared by Syeed and Pelavin. (Originally, they were to have appeared together in July; scheduling conflicts delayed Syeed’s visit and necessitated the second installment.)

In his prepared remarks, Syeed addressed the most serious conservative objections to Islam: First, that Islam is incompatible with democracy, and second, that Islam is anti-modern and hostile towards science. Indeed, Syeed used the phrase “pluralist democracy” repeatedly within the first few minutes, partly to remind the audience of America’s long tradition of accepting immigrants and minority groups, but also in explicit contrast to the undemocratic regimes from which Muslim immigrants to America are largely drawn. He further highlighted the high degree of educational attainment among many in the community, including in the sciences.

“Many of us came here from countries where there was no democracy, where having achieved education, there was no place for us,” Syeed said. He extolled the fact that leadership in the Islamic Center of North America is democratically elected and includes women in prominent positions.

Syeed further addressed gender issues exemplified by the Saudi ban on women drivers and, most horrifying for the Western sensibility, female circumcision. Syeed argued these are national or tribal conventions nowhere compelled by the Koran. “It was not easy [for some new immigrants] to cut the umbilical cord from practices that were totally non-Islamic, but were practiced in the Muslim world,” he conceded, adding that rejecting these practices was a focal point for his organization. Finally, he washed his hands of terrorist activities and anti-Western radicalism, arguing that his North American constituency is “as much unrelated to them as any people living in this country.”

The other panelists made brief remarks, followed by questions from the audience. Instructive tensions arose when the discussion focused on the relationship between American Muslims and American Jews, where world historical events come to roost in complex and contradictory ways.

Rabbi Levitt pointed out that beyond shared roots in Abrahamic traditions, Judaism and Islam share the fact of being practical religions. In other words, while Christians typically place faith (i.e., acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior) at the core of their beliefs, for Jews and Muslims what is central is practical adherence to strictures or laws — for Jews halacha, and for Muslims sharia. The manner of interpreting these strictures varies widely within both Judaism and Islam, but in either case observance trumps belief. Banning Sharia law thus amounts to an injunction against the very fact of being Muslim, and as Levitt points out, sets a precedent easily transferable to Judaism as well. Moreover, as event moderator Irwin Venick pointed out later, American Jews share with Muslims an immigrant experience and minority identity that creates natural affinities of interest.

for the full article: http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/an-interfaith-event-asks-the-question-can-jews-muslims-and-christians-all-get-along/Content?oid=2683322

Continue reading »]]> by Cheryl Makin – MyCentralJersey.com

Nov. 23, 2011

FRANKLIN — While peace in the Middle East seems elusive to many, Muslim and Jewish volunteers in Middlesex and Somerset counties joyfully worked together on Sunday to feed the homeless.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, more than 100 members of the Muslims Against Hunger Project, Rutgers Shalom-Salaam and the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding gathered at the Muslim Foundation Inc. mosque in Somerset to cook meals from both religions’ cookbooks.

Delicious smells wafting up from the basement kitchen area of the mosque mingled with friendly conversations and laughter. Volunteers of both faiths created more than 400 meals for the homeless at a veterans shelter and in New York City.
In three hours, volunteers cooked meals consisting of tandoori chicken, rice pilaf, chickpea salad, mixed vegetables (corn and string beans), regular salad, buttered bread, kheer (rice pudding) and cholent (a meat and vegetable stew).

After the cooking session, the volunteers — many wearing Jewish kipot skullcaps and Muslim hijab headscarves — broke bread together as they sampled their meals for an interfaith luncheon of their own.

And after members of both religions recited their afternoon prayers, a group of the volunteers headed to deliver the meals to the homeless.

One group delivered the lunches to the homeless at the Basking Ridge VA homeless shelter, while a second group went to New York City.

There, the volunteers were joined by a group of Brooklyn-based Orthodox Jews from Masbia, a nonprofit soup kitchen network and food pantry that operates in Brooklyn and Queens.

The volunteers then delivered between 150 and 200 boxed meals to the homeless in local hangouts.

The idea for the mission was the brainchild of Zamir Hassan, founder and director of the 10-year-old Muslims Against Hunger Project, and Walter Ruby, the Muslim Jewish Relations Program Officer of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, a New York-based nonprofit organization.

Rutgers Shalom-Salaam was created in 2010 by Will Eastman, a college senior from Edison, and Bahaa Hashem, an Egyptian native. With the addition of students Jane Vorkuhova and Amjad Saeed, the group was born.

for the full news> http://www.mycentraljersey.com/article/20111123/NJNEWS/311230019/Muslim-Jewish-volunteers-work-team-feed-hungry-homeless?odyssey=nav%7Chead

Continue reading »]]> by Ynetnews
11.23.11

Foundation for Ethnic Understanding facilitates 125 events with participation of 250 Muslim, Jewish organizations in 26 countries in four continents

Thousands of Muslims and Jews across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa participated last weekend in The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding’s (FFEU) 4th annual Weekend of Twinning.

Since 2008, FFEU has organized hundreds of similar initiatives around the world in cooperation with the World Jewish Congress and the Islamic Society of North America.

The annual Weekend of Twinning brings together hundreds of synagogues and mosques, cultural centers, Muslim and Jewish university students and young leadership groups and Muslim and Jewish social action networks.

These gatherings have helped Muslims and Jews in North America, Europe and around the world to nurture ties of friendship and trust.

Rabbi Marc Schneier, FFEU President, remarked, “FFEU is proud to showcase these unprecedented international gatherings of Jews and Muslims. The sheer magnitude of this year’s Weekend of Twinning reinforces our efforts to build a global movement of Muslims and Jews committed to communication, reconciliation, cooperation and understanding.”

Participating Muslim and Jewish organizations held their events over the weekend of November 18-20. Some events will continue through the end of December. Social action initiatives include Muslims and Jews feeding the hungry and the homeless in Boston, New Jersey, Toronto and Washington, DC.

FFEU Chairman Russell Simmons noted, “There was a moment in time when some thought that bringing together Imams and Rabbis wouldn’t be productive but I’ve had some of the greatest and most rewarding experiences of my life promoting dialogue. The fact that year after year more Muslims and Jews are joining the conversation speaks volumes.”

Young Professional Leadership events will kick off in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, DC.

for the full news: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4151833,00.html

Continue reading »]]> “‘Abraham Jam’ Interfaith Music Concert Organized By Students of Duke, NC State and Chapel Hill”

By Yonat Shimron – HuffingtonPost

11/21/11

DURHAM, N.C. (RNS) Say the word “interfaith” and the next word to roll off the tongue is probably “dialogue.” It’s hard to think of one without the other. But college students know there are other ways to communicate, and music may be chief among them.

Students from three North Carolina universities — Duke, North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill — on Wednesday (Nov. 16) hosted an interfaith concert they dubbed “Abraham Jam” in an attempt to “do interfaith” in a novel way.

The two-hour concert at Duke featured three singer-songwriters — a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian — plucking their guitar strings onstage and crooning their way toward a new spirit of understanding.

The concert was held as a sort of opening act for Thursday’s fifth annual Amazing Faiths Dinner Dialogue Day, a nationwide effort to break down barriers between people of different religions around a shared vegetarian meal.

Started by the Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance at Rice University in Houston, the dinner drew an estimated 500 people to dialogue around dinner tables in Houston. Similar dinners were held around the Raleigh/Durham area, in Greenville, S.C.; Wichita, Kansas; and Chicago.

The North Carolina students’ initiative was their own attempt at talking across boundaries — only this time using the universal language of music.
The three invited musicians were no amateurs. Dan Nichols is one of the nation’s most beloved Jewish rockers; Dawud Wharnsby, is a Canadian troubadour living in Pakistan; David LaMotte is a singer-songwriter and peacenik in the old folk tradition.

The three had never met until this week, but at LaMotte’s instigation, and with the help of funding from area churches, synagogues and Muslim civic groups, the event helped create an aura of goodwill and reconciliation.

“Having a large interfaith event based around music is unique,” said Matthew Stevens, president of the Muslim Students Association at UNC Chapel Hill. “It allows people to reach out to one another in a new way. I haven’t seen it done in the area.”

A committee of students from each of the three schools picked the musicians. Four performance poets and a dancer were added to the lineup, lending the event an edgier, hipper, more updated feel.

The songs ranged from Wharnsby’s “The People of the Boxes,” (“We’ve got to tip the lid and let some sunlight in”) to Nichols’ “All This Rain,” about the biblical Noah (“Why was I the one and only?”)

LaMotte, in addition to singing, strumming a guitar, and beating a drum, had the trickiest role — as emcee.

for the full news: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/21/abraham-jam-interfaith-music-concert_n_1102107.html

Continue reading »]]> by Mordechai Shinefield, Jewish Exponent Feature

November 16, 2011 –

Ten years ago, Cathleen Cohen began calling artists in the Philadelphia community with the idea of using poetry and the arts to begin a dialogue with local Muslim and Christian communities.
Until then, she had worked primarily alone in the Jewish community, teaching poetry in schools and synagogues. But the events of Sept. 11 had shaken her and she suddenly wanted to reach out.

“There was so much fear and misunderstanding around,” she remembers.

Her particular project would be called “We the Poets,” but the nonprofit organization in which it found a home was the group known as ArtWell, an arts program for Philadelphia youth.

Cohen was one of several artists honored last week at a celebration of ArtWell’s 10th anniversary. The event at Moore College of Art and Design drew several hundred sponsors, friends and artists.

Through ArtWell, Cohen, 58, and other artists at the institution, including Joe Brenman and program associate Julia Katz Terry, have found new ways to draw from their Jewish traditions to create interfaith projects that speak to a broad audience.

Before ArtWell, Cohen had primarily been leading poetry workshops in local synagogues like Beth Am Israel, Main Line Reform Temple and Adath Israel. She developed a handbook for teaching poetry and taught teachers at Gratz College “how to use poetry to help kids learn about prayer and express Jewish themes.”

In addition to her work with ArtWell in the United States, she has taught in Israel, at Haifa University’s Jewish-Arab Center, at high schools in Jaffa and Beersheva, and in Druze villages throughout the Galilee.

Cohen’s work with diverse communities has given her a perspective on how poetry can do the heavy lifting in interfaith dialogues. “I think everybody has a rich tradition of thinking poetry is important,” she said.

“There’s a lot of reflection and deep listening both to yourself and others. Also, it’s a lot of fun,” said Cohen, who also paints and whose work was recently showcased at SOHO20 Chelsea, a gallery in Manhattan. She also participates in ArtWell’s HeartSpeak, which addresses violence prevention in public schools.

Menachem Wecker, who blogs and reports on the intersection between faith and art for the Houston Chronicle, sees art as instrumental in bridging faith communities.

“I think interfaith dialogue is tough to pull without art,” he said in an interview, adding that the words different faiths use to describe their religious experiences are often incommunicable between disparate communities. “We actually don’t understand what we mean by the actual words. I think religious — and interfaith — art helps solve, or at least begin to solve, that problem.”

While Cohen uses poetry to address these issues, Brenman, 62, works in mosaics. In 2003, the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society on Germantown Avenue asked him to participate in creating a mural titled, “Doorways to Peace.”

Brenman’s project was also a reaction to the events of Sept. 11. “The congregation was looking for a way to reach out to the community and show that they were good people. That you didn’t need to be afraid of them,” Brenman recalled.

About 500 tiles were designed in the social hall of the mosque through a series of workshops. Participants came both from within the Al-Aqsa community and from outside it.

“This was a chance to learn about each other’s cultures,” said Brenman, noting the interaction among himself; the project’s painter, who was Christian; and members of the mosque.

To prepare for the experience, one he described as “transformative,” Brenman attended classes at the University of Pennsylvania on ceramic arts and searched for resonances between his own Jewish tradition and Islam, which was foreign to him.

“Some of the people I worked with had never worked with Jewish people before. Doing art is a great way of bringing people together,” said Brenman, who also sculpts in bronze and stoneware and whose murals include a piece commissioned by SEPTA and a sculpture relief called “MasterPeace” at the Albert Einstein Medical Center.

The result was a colorful mosaic on the front of the mosque that stands out amid the empty lots, pizza shops and poorly maintained buildings in the neighborhood.

For her part, Julia Katz Terry, 28, has taken a performance approach to interfaith art. After doing field work in Ghana on Dipo, the female rite of passage ceremony, she returned to the United States looking to give young people an opportunity to have their own coming-of-age experiences. “I found there was a big void in terms of positive, multicultural arts based on coming-of- age experiences,” she said.

Using her Ghana travels, she developed a curriculum called “The Art of Growing Up” that she piloted locally in 2005 with 10 girls. In the program, students design masks that show their idealized self-image and hold ceremonies for community leaders and elders to come and celebrate the students’ passages into adulthood. She has since expanded the program for boys and taught it in public schools, after-school and summer programs throughout the city.

“My experience of coming-of-age traditions started with my own — having a Bat Mitzvah,” Katz Terry explained, adding that she did not appreciate the meaning of the ceremony until years later.

“Most kids aren’t celebrated for becoming teenagers,” she said. “I feel very lucky to have been celebrated at such a powerful and important time in life and wish that for everyone.”

The Houston Chronicle’s Wecker cautions that a major challenge for artists doing interfaith work is making sure that the art is serious, and not just kitsch. “If you think it’s going to save the world, then you’re mistaken,” he said of the serious work. “But if you think it’s totally useless, then you’re also missing the point.

source: http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/24764/Arts_Doing_Well_as_Path_to/

Continue reading »]]> By Yonat Shimron – WASHINGTON POST
November 18 2011

DURHAM, N.C. — Say the word “interfaith” and the next word to roll off the tongue is probably “dialogue.” It’s hard to think of one without the other. But college students know there are other ways to communicate, and music may be chief among them.

Students from three North Carolina universities — Duke, North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill — on Wednesday (Nov. 16) hosted an interfaith concert they dubbed “Abraham Jam” in an attempt to “do interfaith” in a novel way.
The two-hour concert at Duke featured three singer-songwriters — a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian — plucking their guitar strings onstage and crooning their way toward a new spirit of understanding.

The concert was held as a sort of opening act for Thursday’s fifth annual Amazing Faiths Dinner Dialogue Day, a nationwide effort to break down barriers between people of different religions around a shared vegetarian meal.

Started by the Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance at Rice University in Houston, the dinner drew an estimated 500 people to dialogue around dinner tables in Houston. Similar dinners were held around the Raleigh/Durham area, in Greenville, S.C.; Wichita, Kansas; and Chicago.

The North Carolina students’ initiative was their own attempt at talking across boundaries — only this time using the universal language of music.

The three invited musicians were no amateurs. Dan Nichols is one of the nation’s most beloved Jewish rockers; Dawud Wharnsby, is a Canadian troubadour living in Pakistan; David LaMotte is a singer-songwriter and peacenik in the old folk tradition.

The three had never met until this week, but at LaMotte’s instigation, and with the help of funding from area churches, synagogues and Muslim civic groups, the event helped create an aura of goodwill and reconciliation.

“Having a large interfaith event based around music is unique,” said Matthew Stevens, president of the Muslim Students Association at UNC Chapel Hill. “It allows people to reach out to one another in a new way. I haven’t seen it done in the area.”

A committee of students from each of the three schools picked the musicians. Four performance poets and a dancer were added to the lineup, lending the event an edgier, hipper, more updated feel.

for the full news: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/students-do-interfaith-through-universal-language-of-music/2011/11/18/gIQAxqPxYN_story.html

Continue reading »]]> by Mario Toneguzzi, Calgary Herald
October 15, 2011

Rabbis and Islamic scholars in Calgary are meeting to discuss their views on the meaning and relevance of their religion’s holiest scriptures.

They will be presenting their views on their holy books and what makes them holy and what the holy books say about peace and interfaith relations.

The Word of God for Divine Guidance will be held Wednesday, Oct. 26, at 6: 30 p.m. at the Beth Tzedec Congregation, 1325 Glenmore Tr. S.W., and is free and open to the public.

Rabbi Shaul Osadchey, of the Beth Tzedec Congregation, said the idea came following an Ahmadiyya conference last spring of Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars.

He extended an invitation to have the next conference at his synagogue.

“It will be the first such conference at a Jewish house of worship and is intended to draw a large number of Jews and Muslims into a constructive dialogue about their respective traditions,” he says.

The topic of the conference will explore questions about the nature of the sacred texts of the two religions – the Torah and the Qur’an.

Osadchey and Rabbi Howard Voss-Altman of Temple B’nai Tikvah will discuss this topic with Islamic scholars Maulana Mahmood Butt and Mualana Mukhtar Cheema.

There will also be time for questions following the panel presentation.

Conference organizers Mohammed Atif and Osadchey say this is a step forward in Jewish-Muslim relations by noting “that education and dialogue offer the best opportunities for Jews and Muslims to better understand each other and to eliminate myths and stereotypes.”

For further information and registration, visit www.islamevents.ca/ calgary or contact info.calgary@ ahmadiyya.ca or info@bethtzedec.ca.

“The intensity of the conflict in the Middle East emanates from a variety of complex historical, political, economic, social and religious factors,” says Osadchey. “The heat from that strife fans out globally until the embers land in local communities. However, Jewish and Muslim communities in Calgary, for example, lead lives in which the political and economic issues in the Middle East are not directly pertinent to their daily lives. Only the social and religious aspects remain as potential obstacles for interfaith co-operation.

“The goal of the Ahmadiyya-Jewish conference is to douse stereotypes and misinformation about our respective religions to find common ground to forge a peaceful relationship. In turn, the local level can serve too as a type of interfaith model that can be emulated in the Middle East.

source: http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/Muslim+Jewish+scholars+hold+dialogue/5555746/story.html#ixzz1auyXBCOJ

Continue reading »]]> By Josef Kuhn – HUFFINGTONPOST
10/9/11
WASHINGTON (RNS) More than a thousand rabbis from around the world have signed a statement denouncing the burning of an Israeli mosque as police arrested a suspect who is alleged to be a Jewish extremist.

“We condemn those in Israel who exacerbate conflict and strife, and who insist that only one people or religion belongs to this land,” said the statement, which organizers say was overwhelmingly signed by U.S. rabbis.

The statement was presented on Thursday (Oct. 6) by a delegation of dozens of rabbis and peace activists to the imam of Tuba-Zangria, the Galilean village where the mosque was torched.

The statement was initiated by the New Israel Fund (NIF), an organization that promotes human rights and religious pluralism in Israel.

David Rosenn, the chief operating officer of NIF and a Conservative rabbi, called the mosque arson “a flagrant challenge to Jewish history and values.”

The envoys to Tuba-Zangria were led by a coalition established in 2009 in response to a book that argued that, in times of war, Jewish law permits the pre-emptive killing of noninvolved gentiles, including children.

The arson has been condemned by Israel’s chief rabbis and a host of Jewish groups in the United States, including the Anti-Defamation League, which said the attack represented “the violence and hatred among fringe groups of Israeli Jewish extremists.”

Israeli officials have arrested a suspect in the arson, described by The Associated Press as an “18-year-old seminary student with ties to one of the most hardline Jewish settlements in the West Bank.”

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/09/burned-mosque-israel-rabbis_n_1001648.html

Continue reading »]]> by Leonard Swidler,

Temple University

Dialogue in the interreligious, interideological sense is a conversation on a common subject between people with differing views undertaken so that they can learn from one another and grow. The Dialogue Decalogue formulated by Prof. Leonard Swidler sets forth the ground rules for dialogue.

FIRST COMMANDMENT

The essential purpose of dialogue is to learn, which entails change. At the very least, to learn that one’s dialogue partner views the world differently is to effect a change in oneself. Reciprocally, change happens for one’s partner as s/he learns about oneself.

SECOND COMMANDMENT

Dialogue must be a two-sided project: both between religious/ideological groups, and within religious/ideological groups (Inter- and Intra-). Intra-religious/ideological dialogue is vital for moving one’s community toward an increasingly perceptive insight into reality.

THIRD COMMANDMENT

It is imperative that each participant comes to the dialogue with complete honesty and sincerity. This means not only describing the major and minor thrusts as well as potential future shifts of one’s tradition, but also possible difficulties that s/he has with it.

FOURTH COMMANDMENT

One must compare only her/his ideals with their partner’s ideals, and her/his practice with their partner’s practice. Not their ideals with their partner’s practice.

FIFTH COMMANDMENT

Each participant needs to describe her/himself. For example, only a Muslim can describe what it really means to be an authentic member of the Muslim community. At the same time, when one’s partner in dialogue attempts to describe back to them what they have understood of their partner’s self-description, then such a description must be recognizable to the described party.

SIXTH COMMANDMENT

Participants must not come to the dialogue with any preconceptions as to where the points of disagreement lie. A process of agreeing with their partner as much as possible, without violating the integrity of their own tradition, will reveal where the real boundaries between the traditions lie: the point where s/he cannot agree without going against the principles of their own tradition.

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT

Dialogue can only take place between equals, which means that partners learn from each other—par cum pari according to the Second Vatican Council—and do not merely seek to teach one another.

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT

Dialogue can only take place on the basis of mutual trust. Because it is persons, and not entire communities, that enter into dialogue, it is essential for personal trust to be established. To encourage this it is important that less controversial matters are discussed before dealing with the more controversial ones.

NINTH COMMANDMENT

Participants in dialogue should have a healthy level of criticism toward their own traditions. A lack of such criticism implies that one’s tradition has all the answers, thus making dialogue not only unnecessary, but unfeasible. The primary purpose of dialogue is to learn, which is impossible if one’s tradition is seen as having all the answers.

TENTH COMMANDMENT

To truly understand another religion or ideology one must try to experience it from within, which requires a “passing over,” even if only momentarily, into another’s religious or ideological experience.

for the full article as PDF: Dialogue Decalogue: Ground Rules for Interreligious, Interideological Dialogue

source: http://institute.jesdialogue.org/resources/tools/decalogue/

Continue reading »]]> by Peace Islands Institute
October 06, 2011

The Peace Islands Institute (PII), formerly the Interfaith Dialog Center, was active throughout Ramadan, August 2011, with Iftar organizations at various churches and synagogues (friendship gatherings), and home dinners (neighborliness project) where Turkish-American families hosted their non-Muslim friends at their homes.
As PII, we believe by breaking bread together we will have a stronger dialogue and better understanding of each other’s values and ethnicity. This will set an example for our children to follow and make our and future communities a better place to live in. Below you will find reflections on Ramadan dinners.
The PII contacted several churches and synagogues before Ramadan with whom we have been working together in interfaith journey. Volunteering families prepared home-made Turkish food to be served at the Iftars. Iftar dinners took place in various locations across NJ such as Dumont, Morristown, North Caldwell, Tenafly and Riverton. More than 30 people attended each dinner, where typically half of the attendees were from Turkish-American community and the other half from the respective house of worship.

Rev. Elaine Wing of Dumont Calvary United Methodist Church expressed gratitude for co-hosting a Friendship Dinner with the Peace Islands Institute. As people arrived, they gathered in a circle to introduce each other, occasionally finding out interesting and pleasantly surprising connections.
Fr. Anthony J. Randazzo, pastor at Notre Dame in North Caldwell, remembered several families from his congregation attending dinners at Turkish homes and complimented the friendly hosts, the faith-based conversations and the delicious Turkish food. “This year those gracious families arrived at the parish house with trays of homemade humus and other Turkish delights,” he added. Crispy baked bread, eaten during Ramadan, was broken and shared among new friends. Pistachio baklava sweetened the learning experience about each other’s respective faith traditions. Conversations at the tables engaged the inquisitive, faith-seeking minds. The opening grace in Arabic – Call to Prayer – around the kitchen’s island unified all in sacred tones.
David Iskovitz, Director of Education at Temple B’nai Or in Morristown, joined Fr. Randazzo on the importance of coming together around a table. He described the evening as follows: “What a beautiful evening of prayer shared by Jews and Muslims experiencing the joy of God. Coming together as one we were able to silently communicate how our faiths share the same values of community, love, and obligations. Our heritages blended and created a beautiful and spiritual evening”. These words resonated well with the mission of the PII and the motivation for organizing these dinners.
John Bruton, a parishioner at Calvary UMC in Dumont, said it was more than just the food. It was an opportunity to get to know and see the similarities of hard working people. He added, “I would say the dinner was a huge success and that after dining with a small family I felt they were very similar, hard working people just like me”.

for the full story: http://www.nj.com/helpinghands/index.ssf/2011/10/reflections_on_ramadan.html

Continue reading »]]> By Shlomo Shamir HAARETZ.com
12.09.11
NEW YORK – While the eyes of Americans and many others the world over were fixed Sunday on the main event marking a decade after 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York, Christians, Jews and Muslims were due to meet at joint inter-faith ceremonies and dialogues and together recall the memory of those killed in the horrific terrorist attacks.

The meetings between the priests, rabbis and imams in churches, mosques and synagogues began already over the weekend and were due to continue Sunday, in an attempt to show the renewal of the spirit of reconciliation and coexistence that the terrorists had hoped to destroy.

It transpires that, far from the limelight and the media, and without the intervention of publicity-seeking politicians, the 10th anniversary of September 11 has turned into a demonstration of friendship and cooperation between senior representatives of the three monotheistic faiths in the United States.

In New York itself, 15 joint events were scheduled to take place for believers from the three religions. Other interfaith ceremonies were to be held in Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago and additional cities. At the opening event in New York on Friday, 2,000 Muslims gathered in the city’s giant mosque in Manhattan to remember the victims. In addition to the imam, Shamsi Ali, who is considered a key Muslim leader in the United States and who delivered the main sermon there, speeches were made by two rabbis and two priests. As a tribute to New York’s Muslim community, the commissioner of the New York City Police Department, Raymond Kelly, also attended the ceremony.

In Miami Beach in Florida, joint prayer sessions were held on Friday in the three communities. Catholics and Jews attended a memorial ceremony at a mosque in the city, and later representatives of the Catholic and Muslim communities attended a prayer session at the Reconstructionist movement’s Temple Beth Or in Miami. On Sunday Jews and Muslims were also due to attend a ceremony at a local church there.

for the full story: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/signs-of-stronger-interfaith-dialogue-in-u-s-since-9-11-1.383856

Continue reading »]]> PARIS — The stories of the Holocaust have been documented, distorted, clarified and filtered through memory. Yet new stories keep coming, occasionally altering the grand, incomplete mosaic of Holocaust history.

One of them, dramatized in a French film released here last week, focuses on an unlikely savior of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France: the rector of a Paris mosque.

Muslims, it seems, rescued Jews from the Nazis.

“Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”) is a tale of courage not found in French textbooks. According to the story, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, provided refuge and certificates of Muslim identity to a small number of Jews to allow them to evade arrest and deportation.

It was simpler than it sounds. In the early 1940s France was home to a large population of North Africans, including thousands of Sephardic Jews. The Jews spoke Arabic and shared many of the same traditions and everyday habits as the Arabs. Neither Muslims nor Jews ate pork. Both Muslim and Jewish men were circumcised. Muslim and Jewish names were often similar.

The mosque, a tiled, walled fortress the size of a city block on the Left Bank, served as a place to pray, certainly, but also as an oasis of calm where visitors were fed and clothed and could bathe, and where they could talk freely and rest in the garden.

It was possible for a Jew to pass.

“This film is an event,” said Benjamin Stora, France’s pre-eminent historian on North Africa and a consultant on the film. “Much has been written about Muslim collaboration with the Nazis. But it has not been widely known that Muslims helped Jews. There are still stories to be told, to be written.”

The film, directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi, is described as fiction inspired by real events and built around the stories of two real-life figures (along with a made-up black marketeer). The veteran French actor Michael Lonsdale plays Benghabrit, an Algerian-born religious leader and a clever political maneuverer who gave tours of the mosque to German officers and their wives even as he apparently used it to help Jews.

for the full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/movies/how-a-paris-mosque-sheltered-jews-in-the-holocaust.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&smid=fb-share

Continue reading »]]> By Renee Ghert-Zand
09/19/2011

As the first woman to be ordained a Conservative rabbi, Amy Eilberg occupies a major place in the annals of Jewish women’s history. She has recently been squeezing her self into a very small space in the hopes of making another kind of history.
Since September 11, she and seven other interfaith clergy have been crammed into a specially decorated van traveling a large swatch of the eastern and central parts of the country. They are on the “Religious Leaders for Reconciliation Caravan,” a literal and figurative drive to “re-knit the torn fabric of American society,” as Eilberg put it in a phone interview with The Sisterhood.
The Caravan is a project of Clergy Beyond Borders, a Maryland-based conflict resolution and interfaith education organization founded two years ago by Imam Yahya Hendi, the Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University, and Rabbi Gerald Serotta, founding chair of the organization Rabbis for Human Rights.
By the end of this road show on September 26, the group of progressive Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and Muslim leaders will have made stops in 18 cities in 13 states over 15 days, to engage with and encourage audiences to exhibit mutual respect and religious tolerance in the face of what they perceive as a growing threat to religious pluralism in this country.
In some locations, such as in Tennessee, where anti-Sharia legislation has been proposed, they are speaking with law- and policy makers. At most of their 50 or so stops, they are meeting with groups of between 10 and 500 people at university campuses, churches, synagogues, mosques and community centers.
These gatherings, to which the Caravan has given the title, “From Fear to Faith: Advancing American Voices for Religious Pluralism,” involve one representative from each faith sharing reasons for why they are engaged in this work. “We share relevant sources from our traditions and personal stories,” Eilberg said. “It’s homiletic in style. We want to touch hearts.”
Then the floor is opened up for questions and answers. Eilberg reported that so far, audiences have been 90 percent supportive. This is not surprising given that the meetings have been organized by local partnering interfaith organizations. People have expressed concern about living in a world with terrorism and have asked whether religious pluralism requires one to give up allegiances or a commitment to mission or proselytizing. Attendees have wanted to know how they can counter hateful messages in the media and make a real difference.
“Only on one occasion were we faced with a greater level of challenge,” Eilberg recounted. A couple of conservative Muslims questioned some scriptural interpretations made by Hendi, a Palestinian who is on the record for favoring co-existence and peace with Israel, and tried to steer the conversation toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and away from religious pluralism in America. Eilberg is not the only female rabbi in the Caravan. In fact, all the rabbis rotating in and out of the van over the two weeks are women. The other rabbis are Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, director of the Department of Multifaith Studies and Initiatives at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Alana Suskin, director of Lifelong Learning at Shaare Torah Congregation in Gaithersburg, MD and a senior editor at Jewschool.com.
Eilberg, who works as a consultant to the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning in St. Paul, MN, believes women are socialized to be peacemakers. “It’s in our instincts to put relationships above personal aggrandizement. Women have the kind of communications skills needed for peacemaking,” she said.
She definitely sees this play out in the fact that most leaders in intra-Jewish dialogue are female.
“It’s no accident that the national leaders in this field are women,” she says. But, surprisingly, she has not found this to be the case in interfaith dialogue and relations. Her experience has been that there is more of a gender balance. “Most of my closest colleagues in interfaith are both men and women,” she reflected. “And obviously the two men leading this Caravan are feminists. Why else would there be only women rabbis in this van?”

source: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/143015/#.Tne0Pdawet8.facebook

Continue reading »]]> by Karen Peake
July 6, 2011

A new Ipsos MORI poll has found that religion still matters to most people in the world.

The global survey looked at the views of over 18,000 people across 24 countries, including the UK and US.

Seven in 10 of those surveyed said they had a religion but there was a marked difference between Christians and Muslims when it came to the importance they placed on their faith.

In Muslim-majority countries, 94% of those with a religion agreed that their faith was important in their lives, compared to 66% in Christian-majority countries.

Muslims were far more likely to believe that their religion was the only true path to salvation, liberation or paradise – 61% compared to 19% in Christian-majority countries.

They were also more likely to say that their faith or religion was a key motivator in giving time and money to people in need – 61% compared to 24% in primarily Christian societies.

Overall, 30% said that their religion motivated them to give their time or money to people in need, while more than half (52%) said that their religion made no difference to their giving because they saw it as important in any case.

Globally, faith was found to be important to young people. Almost three-quarters (73%) of under-35s said their religion or faith was important in their life.

A third of all respondents across the 24 countries said they had no or almost no friends or acquaintances from any religion other than their own.

Chief executive of Ipsos MORI, Ben Page said: “The survey is a good reminder to many in western Europe of how much religion matters – and is a force for good – in much of the world.

“Our analysis shows people would rather keep politics separate from religion, but that in a globalising world, it still matters more than many in old Europe think.”

The results were also welcomed by Tony Blair, a practising Catholic and patron of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

“This survey shows how much religion matters and that no analysis of the contemporary world, political or social, is complete without understanding the relationship between faith and globalisation,” he said.

“The evidence is that, though people fear the prospect of religious strife, even here in Britain, there is much to encourage the view that people can learn to respect those of another faith and live with them peacefully.

“Inter-faith dialogue and action today is not just an interesting but peripheral minor subject, it is the essence, central to creating greater social cohesion and harmony.”

sourcE: http://www.christiantoday.com/article/religion.still.matters.global.survey.finds/28257.htm

Continue reading »]]> by Steve Lipman
Tuesday, July 5, 2011

A Jewish native of Vienna, 28-year-old Ilja Sichrovsky is at the vanguard of a movement to improve relations between Jews and Muslims. As founder and secretary of the Muslim Jewish Conference (mjconference.org), he recently brought several dozen young members of both communities together at the University of Vienna for six days of dialogue and leadership-training activities.

Sichrovsky is the son of Peter Sichrovsky, an Austrian journalist and author who wrote groundbreaking books in the 1980s about young Jews in Austria, and about the children of Holocaust survivors and of Nazis. He later was elected to the European Parliament, as a member of the rightwing Freedom Party.

The Jewish Week spoke with Ilja Sichrovsky recently at the Manhattan office of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which supports his work.

Q: We’re familiar with the growing Muslim influence — often threatening Jewish interests — in such European countries as England, France and Germany. What sort of Islamic community does Austria have, and how are its relations with the country’s small Jewish community?
A: The Muslim community in Austria is around 400,000 official members. There are many who consider themselves Muslim but have not officially registered to be part of the Muslim community, so it is hard to come up with an exact number. The relationship with the Jewish community is a peaceful one, which of course includes sometimes-emotional debates about the Middle East.

Some say it’s not safe for a Jew to walk around parts of Paris, the Muslim neighborhoods, with a visible kipa or Magen David. Are the Muslim parts of Vienna safer?

I have experienced anti-Semitism in many forms in Austria, but these experiences have always been with right-wing Austrians or Nazi supporters. I never experienced Muslim anti-Semitism in Austria; wearing a kipa is not a problem in areas where there is a strong Muslim population.

How does a Viennese Jew, the grandson of Holocaust refugees, develop such a strong interest in relations with Muslims?

I met the Pakistan delegation to the Harvard World Model UN Conference 2007 in Geneva. I was approached by one member of the delegation with the words: “I heard that you are Jewish; you are the first Jew I ever met.” We spent the next hours talking about what we thought we knew about each other. It was shocking how much of what we thought we knew were actually stereotypes and prejudices. We established an honest, fruitful friendship. After this, I was determined to replicate what Mustafa and myself had accomplished, and show the Muslim and Jewish leaders of tomorrow that inter-religious relationships can be strong.

Are you optimistic that better relations between Jews and Muslims are possible?

I do not just believe it. I witness it with my own eyes over and over again.

Is your optimism limited to the younger generation of Jews and Muslims, or can older members of both communities find common ground?

The younger generation is definitely the key. But we have seen the older generation getting involved. I see reason for hope in every individual that throws overboard what he or she heard, read and watched on TV. The alumnae of the MJC 2010 have so far facilitated Muslim-Jewish projects or dialogue in Canada, Hungary, Austria and Sweden. An active grassroots movement in various countries is being built.

Your father, while living in Vienna, was a peripheral member of the Jewish community; his work with Nazis’ children was not widely supported or appreciated by Austrian Jews. Do you find much support or understanding in the Jewish community for your dealings with Muslims?

The simple answer is yes and no. There was incredible support from individual members of the Jewish community. The main synagogue in Vienna welcomed us. Unfortunately, the official representatives of this community reacted differently; there was no support whatsoever.

Are you, working to improve relations with Muslims, following in the footsteps of your father, who was concerned with the post-war generation of young Jews and children of Nazis?

Although I admire the work my father did, it was not what motivated me to get active in Muslim-Jewish relations. It is simply the experience that I was so wrong in my picture of “the other.”

for the full article: http://www.thejewishweek.com/features/new_york_minute/building_muslim_jewish_ties_vienna_and_beyond

Continue reading »]]> By SAMAR FATANY | ARAB NEWS

Conflict between different faiths today is caused by deviant viewpoints and misinterpretations of the divine scriptures

To move Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations forward we need to resolve the ideological crisis that has long allowed extremely radical views to permeate our societies. The perpetuation of outmoded customs and traditions entwined with Islamic principles need to be untangled to separate the medieval societal customs from the true principles of Islam.

Saudi Arabia has taken major steps to spread the culture of moderation and confront extremism and radicalism that have been permitted to masquerade as the message of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and sullied what should be the reputation of faithful Muslims around the world.

In December 2005 a special Islamic summit was held in Makkah to reaffirm the consensus of all Muslim countries to renounce violence, extremism and terrorism, and to promote values of dialogue, tolerance and mutual respect among religions and cultures.

In May 2008 Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah met with Muslim scholars of different sects in Makkah to promote the genuine message of Islamic tolerance during the International Islamic Conference for Dialogue.

The Ministry for Islamic Affairs also does its part across the country to advance a proper interpretation of Islam and allow us to move forward. The Prince Khaled Al-Faisal Chair was inaugurated in 2009 with the objective to empower the community to reject the culture of extremism and fanaticism and promote moderation.

Meanwhile, academics and researchers continue to address the challenges of extremism. During a forum on the concepts of moderation, terrorism and intellectual security, King Abdulaziz University professor Abdul Rahman Al-Wahabi said: “Discussions about concepts of moderation in contemporary Saudi culture has emerged on a large scale due to the perception of the danger posed by extremist concepts and the prevalence of extremist ideology, particularly in religious thought.”

He also noted “activating the process of moderation does not come simply by making wishes but rather through intensive educational agendas that are followed by application in real life in an organized manner via a series of social activities.”

“Moderate thought is the acknowledgment of others, accepting them and co-existing with them,” said Islamic researcher Zaki Al-Milad. “Moderation should be the attribute that permeates all our ideas and actions, far from radicalism and extremism and far from reclusion and isolationism.”

Young people today are confused over what is modern and what is Western, what is hard-line and what is required of a good Muslim. They are struggling to find direction that can help them advance and modernize. There are summer camps and cultural activities offering guidance and mentoring to promote better citizenship, so young people can contribute to humanity and serve the Muslim nation worldwide.

The whole country is on a mission to empower an educated and more-tolerant generation that can command respect for its spirituality and academic excellence. Academic institutions encourage progressive thinking and allow students to embrace innovative ideas without compromising their Islamic values and principles.

Our brothers and sisters who are living in the West or in other Muslim countries need to be aware that Saudi religious scholars and the Saudi people promote moderation and reject extremism under the leadership of King Abdullah.

Every Muslim today should make it his or her duty to promote the religion of peace and repudiate the misconceptions about Islam that have started with Samuel Huntington’s theory of a clash of civilizations and later fueled by suspicious allegations by right-wing outlets and extremists. These extremists are unfortunately aided by biased authors, like Daniel Pipes, and many others. There are those in the West, whose growing hostility toward Islam leads to discrimination and sometimes even hate crimes and who use extremist tactics to drive a wedge between Islam and the West.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 compounded the suspicions and fears against Muslims and created extreme prejudice against them. The principle of collective guilt was applied to all Muslims, and a decade after 9/11, a vicious campaign continues to label Islam as monolithic and incapable of adapting to new realities, that it is a religion inferior to those of the West and that it does not share common values with the other major faiths.

There are many global Muslim organizations confronting this unjust attack; however, despite all their efforts Islamophobia is on the rise, and Muslims are still stereotyped as inferior, violent and recalcitrant. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Muslim World League and other groups continue to address the rise of Islamophobia that openly targets innocent Muslims around the globe.

The conflict between different faiths today is caused by deviant viewpoints and misinterpretations of the divine scriptures. Extremists on both sides undermine the noble efforts of the peace loving people of the world. It pains me to hear Muslim extremists attacking the moderates when they speak out for understanding. It also saddens me to listen to the bigotry and hatred against Muslims in the West fomented by extremist Christian preachers.

The time has now come for all the peace-loving people to unite and stand against radicals who continue to undermine global efforts to promote peace and coexistence. Domestically, we hope to see the carefully crafted plans of our leaders begin to bring the much needed positive changes for progress and development. Globally, we hope to see the beginning of a new era in which each human being — man and woman — can be assured of the respect and freedom that only a just and peaceful world can provide.

— Samar Fatany is a Jeddah-based broadcaster and author.

source: http://arabnews.com/opinion/columns/article465651.ece?comments=all

Continue reading »]]> by DNA Correspondent
Jun 11, 2011

It is often assumed that inter-religious dialogue is a product of sectarian conflicts which are afflicting the world. But as a group of scholars described it at a meeting on Friday, such talks are as old as religion.
The first such meeting took place between Jews and Zoroastrians in Mesopotamia in fifth century BC, said Dr Homi Dhalla, president of the Foundation for Unity of Religions and Enlightenment of Citizenship, a group set up former president APJ Abdul Kalam.
Emphasising the importance of inter-religious dialogue, Dr Dhalla said that the 10-year old conflict in Mozambique was put to an end after religious leaders in the country sat for a meeting. Similarly, a group working for the resolution of inter-religious conflict, the New York-based World Council of Religions for Peace also played a role in ending the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“Now, Christian-Muslim dialogue is taking place in Turkey, Tunisia, Qatar, Bangladesh and Philippines,” he said, adding that animportant requirement for successful talks between religious groups was the jettisoning of pre-conceived notions about other religions. Islamic scholar Dr Engineer described the astonishing similarities between Hindu and Muslim scriptures.
“Few people know the similarities between the Gayatri Mantra and the Sur-e-fateha, the first chapter of the Koran. Mohammad Iqbal (the poet) translated the Gayatri Mantra into Urdu to show the similarities. After all, we believe in one god. But because there are different languages in which the word ‘god’ is expressed, other religions feel alien,” he said.
He said that religious scholar Dara Shukoh learned Sanskrit in Benaras, and showed that the only difference between Hinduism and Islam was the languages the scriptures were written in and not substance. “Satyam, Shivam and Sundaram — the names for god has an equivalent in the different names for Allah — Haqq (truth), Jabbar (powerful) and Jaleel (Sublime),” he said.
“Two religions never collide; it is our interests that clash. We use religion for our interest.” Dr Narendra Desai, trustee of International Society for Krishna Conciousness (ISKCON) said that the main reason for religious conflicts was egoism and greed.
Most speakers talked about the role played by Sufis in bringing peace between religions. Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi was spoken of as the best example.

source: http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_conflict-is-of-interests-not-of-religion_1553989

Continue reading »]]> by FOX40 WICZ NEWS
5/22/2011

A meeting of faiths. Christians, Jews and Muslims came to the Islamic organization of the Southern Tier Sunday afternoon to share their beliefs and experiences with one another.

People from all three faiths came together to enjoy a meal together. The event was designed to promote understanding between people of all faiths.

“We hope that people will learn not to fear the differences that we have with each other and learn to respect one another in spite of our differences,” said John Goodell. “We are not all going to agree on the same things it is not possible, but we hope we can learn to have respect, compassion and understanding for one another.”

This was the fourth interfaith meeting under the Children of Abraham program, and similar events are expected to be held in the future.

Source: http://www.wicz.com/news2005/viewarticle.asp?a=18734

Continue reading »]]> By ARAB NEWS
May 24, 2011

JEDDAH: Deputy Education Minister Faisal bin Muammar emphasized the importance of interfaith dialogue in order to promote peaceful coexistence among the followers of different religions and cultures.
“It is also essential to make joint efforts to stop the deterioration of moral values and fight poverty, terrorism and other crimes,” the minister said while addressing the Bordeaux Religious Leaders Summit.
He announced the plan to establish an international interfaith dialogue center in Vienna. “Saudi Arabia, Austria and Spain have agreed to sign an agreement to establish the center within a few weeks,” he said.
The new center will be named after Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, who initiated the dialogue between various faith communities.
“The world is badly in need of peace, security and prosperity and establishment of justice and love and Saudi Arabia gives utmost importance to these principles and values,” Muammar said.
He referred to the growing number of crimes, cases of poverty in different parts of the world and the damage caused to the environment, adding that these challenges required joint action by all faith groups.
Muammar emphasized the importance of promoting dialogue between followers of the various religions and cultures in order to create understanding and make use of their synergy for the progress and prosperity of the whole humanity.
“Dialogue is essential to understand the similarities of the various religions and cultures and strengthen cooperation among peoples,” he said.
King Abdullah visited the Vatican in Rome and held talks with Pope Benedict XVI in July 2007. The historic meeting, the first between a Roman Catholic pope and a Saudi king, took place during his European tour.
In June 2008, King Abdullah invited 500 Islamic scholars and Muslim leaders from the different parts of the world to discuss the need for promoting interfaith dialogue. He launched the first dialogue conference in Madrid on July 16, 2008 attended by 300 leaders representing Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. “If we want to make this gathering successful, we have to look at the things that unite us, most importantly the faith in God and the noble values and morals that represent the basis of religions.”

source: http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article427679.ece

Continue reading »]]> by Philippine Daily Inquirer
05/09/2011

RALLIES protesting the killing of Osama bin Laden by American forces have broken out in Gaza and Pakistan. Since Gaza is dominated by Hamas, a conservative Islamist group classified by the US and the European Union as a terrorist group, the protest rallies there had been expected. But the demonstrations were led by the Salafist, rival of the Hamas, which broke up the rally because of the unity deal it signed recently with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his more secular Fatah movement. Although the Hamas head in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh has denounced Bin Laden’s killing as an assassination “of an Arab holy warrior,” Hamas has sought to distance itself from the extremism of al-Qaida and Salafist. The latter considers Hamas too moderate. Hamas knows that peace in Palestine depends on a rejection of jihadist violence, not a glorification of it.

The rallies in Pakistan were expected. The raid against Bin Laden in a suburb of the capital Islamabad was carried out by the US without Pakistani leaders being given prior notice. Although it’s unfair to accuse Islamabad of harboring the al-Qaida leader, it is well known that he had popular support among Muslims there, which made it difficult for Pakistani authorities to capture him. The support was reaffirmed by the rallies protesting his killing.

But the fact that majority of Muslims stayed away from the rallies should indicate that from 2001 when the Twin Towers fell and 2011 when Bin Laden was killed, there has occurred a sea-change in the mainstream Muslim world that the extremism of the sort that al-Qaida espouses is anathema to Islam. As a result of the terrorist attacks that have been carried out in the United States and other non-Islamic countries, the Islamic world, by and large, has come to believe that al-Qaida, Jemaah Islamiyah and other jihadist groups have been misrepresenting the tenets of Islam.

The kings of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have expressed common cause with Christians against the abuse of Islam by terrorists. Some 130 Islamic scholars have written a broad letter containing an explicit invitation to dialogue with Christianity. It also provided an interpretation of Islam that immediately places it in dialogue with Christianity.

Pope Benedict XVI has warmly welcomed this invitation. He has also outlined two points that Islam needs to clarify: “the questions concerning its relation to violence and its relation to reason.” The first question he had dealt with some controversy, especially when he delivered his by now famous Regensburg address in 2006, in which he quoted the late medieval Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus addressing a Persian Muslim interlocutor “with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable,” the Pope took care to point out, regarding Mohammed’s command “to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” To the Byzantine leader, violence cannot be ascribed to the monotheism of Christianity and Islam. “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” the Pope said.

The second question is related to the first. As Benedict put it, “The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” But as scholars of Muslim history have pointed out, intellectualism has never really been accepted by Islam. The introduction of Greek thought into the Islamic world has been seen as a greater threat to the religion than the crusades or the Mongol invasions. Strictly speaking, there’s no Muslim theologian; the counterpart to the Christian theologian is the Islamic legal scholar. The Muslims’ supreme duty has been less to know the truth than to do what is right.

It is a cause of concern and dismay that despite the thousands who have been killed by Bin Laden and others like him who invoke Islam to justify their violence, many Muslims still rally to mourn his death and manifest their approval of Islamic extremism and its campaign of carnage and destruction. But it is also a cause of quiet optimism and comfort that it did not draw as much support as rallies of a similar nature would have before. This shows that the Muslim mainstream is distancing itself from the more fanatical movements that portray Islam, wittingly or unwittingly, as a religion of hate and destruction. The task now is to encourage the mainstream to build up into a critical mass that would challenge the hegemony of Islamic extremism. This can be done by encouraging Islam to dialogue with Christianity, other religions and contemporary society.

Continue reading »]]> by Sheila Musaji
April 10 2011
Stephen Schwartz is the Director of the Center on Islamic Pluralism (CIP), and was a Senior Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In 2003 it was reported that Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum was seeking support to form a progressive Islamic institute that would represent liberal Muslims living in the United States. Pipes sent out a request to various foundations across the United States to raise funds for a proposed Islamic Progress Institute.
At that time, I wrote an article Daniel Pipes the New Voice of Moderate Islam? in which I said in part
And, now, the neo-cons have a new strategy in their War on Islam which is to subvert ignorant and naive Muslims. This strategy was first announced by Paul Wolfowitz a year ago. Then Front Page began what they said would be a series of articles with “A Troubling Influence” by Frank Gaffney, followed by “Ford Has A Better Idea: One Nation Under Allah” by Alyssa Lappen which attacked specific individuals who represent a wide spectrum of ideologies. Daniel Pipes also published an article “Do You Believe in Modernity?” in which he includes a series of questions to use to test whether a Muslim is a moderate or not.
A UPI article recently announced that Daniel Pipes and Stephen Schwartz are seeking major funding for their two organizations to speak on behalf of “REFORMED MUSLIMS”. “Pipes Forming Islamic Institute” . There we have it, the neo-con agenda discovered and described in Jim Lobe’s excellent article, “Neocons Seek Islamic Reform”.
In April of 2005, I added an update to this article which stated that
On March 25, 2005 Daniel Pipes announced on his website the opening of the Center on Islamic Pluralism, directed by Stephen Schwartz — the name has changed from the original Islamic Progress Institute but the cast of characters remains the same. The Center for Islamic Pluralism also opened a website and issued a press release calling itself a “platform for moderate Muslims in North America.” Schwartz also wrote an article entitled “The Battle for Islam is Joined” published, of course on Front Page.

Also in 2003, Schwartz testified at a U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security hearing on the topic of “Wahhabism and Islam in the United States”. In this testimony he stated the unfounded claim that At the present time, Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques – out of a total ranging between an official estimate of 1,200 and an unofficial figure of 4-6,000 – are under Wahhabi control.
Schwartz himself identified the source of this claim The same influences are brought to bear throughout the ten-million-strong Muslim community in America, as well as those in Europe. In the US, 80 percent of mosques are estimated by the Sufi Hisham al-Kabbani, born in Lebanon and now living in the US, to be under the control of Wahhabi imams, who preach extremism.”
Schwartz has involved himself in just about every Islamophobic cause over the years. He says he is a Muslim, and we have to take him at his word. He wrote an article Coming to Islam which is published on a Naqshbandi site. In that article he says “Then I met Shaykh Hisham of the Naqshbandi order, and, within weeks, had made shehadeh, hamdilullah.’ He is referring to Shaykh Hisham Kabbani. He has identified himself as a Sunni-Hanafi Muslim, and as a Sufi. He also uses the name Sulayman Ahmed. However, like Zuhdi Jasser and a few others, some of his opinions and associations are very puzzling. He has attacked just about every mainstream Muslim leader and organization. Anti-Wahhabism and anti-Salafism are the focus of much of his work. The problem is that anyone who doesn’t agree with him completely gets branded with these designations.
In 2006 Schwartz posted an article attacking Hamza Yusuf. Sidi Aftab Ahmad Malik wrote an excellent response which included this paragraph
My immediate response is to question why Schwartz has searched out this reference (of questionable accuracy) to denounce Hamza Yusuf. Why does he go to such pains to try to convince his readership that Yusuf is an extremist who does not speak for the majority of Muslims? The implication of course, is that Schwartz is a moderate Muslim (struggling for plurality) and in fact speaks for the majority of mainstream Muslims. In fact, Schwartz has a long record of denouncing other Muslims as either being Islamists, Jihadists, or Wahhabis—all words that the public has been taught to “understand” represent three incarnations of everything evil in the world today. While the reality remains that many Americans still cannot make sense of Islam, Schwartz’s simplistic articles only offer a dangerous black and white view of a complex landscape. I find it astonishing that Schwartz, the executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism cannot even recognize the plurality within the Muslim community itself, and rather than acknowledge this, he demarcates disperse communities into moderates versus extremists.
In 2009, he posted another diatribe against Hamza Yusuf and the announcement of the opening of the Zaytuna College. Within that article is this statement
Promotion of “Shaykh Hamza” Shakir, and the Zaytuna Institute by Esposito, Kalin, and “The Muslim 500” does not appear coincidental. All of them, along with Rizwan Khan, have been leading participants in the so-called “Common Word” series of “dialogues” between Muslims and Catholic authorities.“Shaykh Hamza” distinguished himself as a major proponent of the “Common Word” effort, from its beginning in 2006, with a letter of 38 mainly second-rank Muslim figures addressed to Pope Benedict XVI. Like “Shaykh Hamza” and the Zaytuna campaign, the “Common Word” has been extravagantly promoted as a major event in the history of Muslim-Christian relations, having produced ever-expanding meetings at Yale and Cambridge universities, as well as discussions in Rome.
The latest such performance, also supported by the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, was held at Georgetown on October 6-9, 2009. In reality, the “Common Word” encounters are public events of an all-too-familiar kind, at which many speeches are made but nothing new or important is said or done. Nevertheless, they obscure the differences between Muslim moderates and Muslim radicals by suggesting that a single, undifferentiated Muslim delegation may treat with the Catholic Church on a basis of equality.
Schwartz approved of Tariq Ramadan being banned from the U.S. saying “Ramadan should not be admitted to the U.S. He has written extensively on the challenge of assimilating Islam in Europe, but has shown by his public statements there that he is not an Islamic moderate at all…” And, he thought that Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) being placed on the no fly list was “correct”.
Schwartz attacked not only ISNA, but Ingrid Mattson. Sarah Posner has reported that
In the shari’ah scare industry, organizations like ISNA are depicted as having secret agendas and the ability to dupe their unwitting supporters. As an example, Stephen Schwartz, in a piece republished at Pipes’ Middle East Forum, maintained that ISNA’s recent past president Ingrid Mattson, has had a “career as a promoter of radical Islam.” Schwartz’s proof that Mattson is not a moderate Muslim: an interview with the Tulsa World, in which Schwartz claims “Mattson defined Shari’ah according to the sweeping definition put forward by Islamists: ‘Shari’ah means the sacred law, a whole set of approaches to living your life in a way that brings you closer to God.’”
When Brandon Mayfield, an American Muslim was mistakenly arrested in the Madrid bombing case, Schwartz had a comment before the facts wee in. Shahed amanullah reported
One week ago, Brandon Mayfield was arrested upon suspicion of participating in the Madrid train bombings of March 11th – his “perfectly formed” fingerprint was alleged to have been found on an unexploded bomb – even though he had never visited Spain and had an expired passport. Friends and family rallied around the man they called “too gentle” to commit terrorism, but the usual warnings about the dangers that lurk among American Muslims were issued. “If he is found to have had a link with the Madrid conspiracy,” noted commentator Stephen Schwartz, “nobody anywhere should be surprised.” Last night, however, Mayfield was unexpectedly freed with no comment just as Madrid investigators linked the fingerprint to a Algerian-born suspect closer to home. And like Chaplain James Yee before him, Mayfield’s release comes with little of the media hype that surrounded his arrest, leaving many Americans with the lingering suspicions their initial detentions caused.
Salim Muwakkil reported that Stephen Schwartz, the neocon author of Two Faces of Islam, insists that he is the first Westerner to use the term Islamofascism in the contemporary context. This is a very strange thing to be proud of.
Schwartz was opposed to the proposed Cordoba House project in New York City.
In 2008, I wrote an article Rabbi Pelavin’s Response to “Attention Rabbi Yoffie: Please Speak To Moderate Muslims” about an incident involving The Center on Islamic Pluralism which included this explanation of the incident
In September, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union for Reformed Judaism addressed the ISNA annual convention. This was followed by Ingrid Mattson, President of ISNA addressing the convention of the Union of Reformed Judaism (Rabbi Yoffie’s organization). Both events were received with overwhelmingly positive responses from both the Muslim and Jewish communities. In fact, both were received with standing ovations. This is a very positive step for Muslim-Jewish dialogue in the U.S.
What is surprising is that recently a group of self-defined Muslim “moderates” published a letter in the popular Jewish Week News, attacking Rabbi Yoffie for choosing ISNA and not them for this partnership. Their letter was entitled “Attention Rabbi Yoffie: Please Speak To Moderate Muslims”.
The letter to Rabbi Yoffie was signed by the following self-identified “moderate Muslims”: Nawab Agha, president, American Muslim Congress; Omran Salman, director, Aafaq Foundation; Kemal Silay, president, Center for Islamic Pluralism; Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, executive director, Center for Islamic Pluralism; Salim Mansur, Canadian director, Center for Islamic Pluralism; Jalal Zuberi, Southern U.S. director, Center for Islamic Pluralism; Imaad Malik, fellow, Center for Islamic Pluralism;
M. Zuhdi Jasser, president, American Islamic Forum for Democracy; Sheikh Ahmed Subhy Mansour, president, International Quranic Center.
Zuhdi Jasser, as noted by Sourcewatch is a Co-founder of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, a Director of the American Islamic Congress, and on the Advisory Board of the Clarion Fund. This is important because Jasser and Schwartz are both working to establish themselves as THE moderate Muslims who should replace the existing American Muslim leadership. You can read about Jasser HERE.
Rabbi Pelavin, the Director of the Commission on Interreligous Affairs of Reform Judaism (Rabbi Yoffie’s organization) crafted the following clear and concise response to this attempt to sideline a mainstream Muslim organization.
The recent letter (“Attention Rabbi Yoffie: Please Speak To Moderate Muslims,” 1/2/08) attacking the Union for Reform Judaism’s outreach to, and work with, moderate, mainstream elements of the American Muslim community requires a response.
Much of the attack centers on the fact that we are working with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which reaches the largest, broadest cross-section of the American Muslim community. ISNA is the largest, broadest, most representative group in American Muslim life. The ISNA convention attracts more than 30,000 participants and is– by any measure – far and away the largest, most significant, event in Muslim American life. If we are serious about engagement with the Muslim community, and we are, than it makes sense to go where the American Muslims are. In contrast, the organizations whose leaders signed the letter represent a very small segment of the American Muslim community.
Second, ISNA has made a significant effort to engage in this type of work. They have opened an office in Washington, D.C. – headed by a very senior member of their staff – to focus on interrelgious work. ISNA has clearly made engagement with the broader American religious community in general, and the Jewish community in particular, a priority.
Third, and not insignificantly, they took the initiative to invite Rabbi Yoffie to address their convention. None of the signatory organizations have ever extended a similar invitation.
Of course none of that would matter if we believed that ISNA were, in the words of the letter “apologists for violence, or proponents of restrictions on freedom under the pretext of religion.” We don’t. As Rabbi Yoffie said in his sermon at our recent Biennial Convention, ISNA “has issued a strong and unequivocal condemnation of terror, including a specific condemnation of Hizbollah and Hamas terror against Jews and Israelis. It has also recognized Israel as a Jewish state and supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These statements provide the framework of common values that we believe are necessary for a fruitful dialogue to occur.” We took note, for example, of the fact that when Rabbi Yoffie spoke at the ISNA convention, he shared the platform with a senior Pentagon official. Further, we have had the opportunity to hear from, and meet with, ISNA President Dr. Ingrid Matson a number of times, in a number of forums, and we have never, never, heard her say anything, or write anything, which could be fairly called “extremist.” In fact, the “radial rhetoric” of hers which the letter cites ( “we see candidates [in the current Presidential election] being asked to prove that they comply with an ever narrower definition of what it means to be a Christian — forget about being a Muslim or a Jew” ) is not only not radical, it strikes me as empirically true.
Finally it was never our intention to work exclusively with ISNA or any other one organization. I am pleased to learn that the organizations that joined in the criticism of our effort are interested in dialogue. Perhaps it might have been more effective for them to signal that interest in some way other than their unhelpful letter in these pages.
Louay Safi saw through this religion building effort. In a 2005 article Hardliners in Search of Moderate Muslims he noted:
The cynicism of the extreme Religious Right aside, the need to distinguish moderate from extremist Muslims is genuine. The terrorist attacks on the American homeland have demonstrated the ruthlessness of the terrorists and their willingness to inflict harms on noncombatant civilians, and the terrorists who undertook these attacks were apparently religiously motivated Muslims. Americans of all religious and ideological backgrounds have a genuine interest in ensuring that religious fanatics do not threaten the safety and security of the public.
9/11 was particularly hard on the American Muslim community. In addition to suffering a high number of casualties, 9/11 attacks brought additional pain to the Muslim community, as Muslims had to deal with suspicious public and added scrutiny by law enforcement agencies. The Muslim community has had more than its fair share of the pain inflicted on Americans as 358 Muslims perished in the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon. American Muslim organizations were the first to issue condemnations of the attacks and their perpetrators. Despite several dozen statements by Muslim organizations and leaders denouncing terrorism, the Religious Right pundits continue to complain that Muslim leaders have not denounced terrorism, and continue to demand more condemnations.
The search for moderate Muslims has become a priority of highest importance in post 9/11. American leaders recognized the need to distinguish between Muslim extremists who are willing to employ terror to achieve political ends, and moderate Muslims who abhor intolerance and indiscriminate targeting of civilians, and who share with their fellow Americans deep concern for the wellbeing of their country. George W. Bush’s emphasis on the peaceful nature of Islam during a visit to the Washington Islamic Center, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and his clear distinction between the peace-loving and law-abiding American Muslims on the one hand, and political extremism and religious fanaticism on the other, was important for reassuring the public and calming public fear immediately after the attacks.
The search for moderate Muslims has attracted a number of ultra-conservative groups, who have, for decades, displayed apprehension and anxiety about the growing presence of Islam in America. Taking advantage of the climate of vulnerability and fear brought about by the horrific attacks of 9/11, and the lack of knowledge on the part of the American public of Islam’s values and civilizational contributions, hardliners embarked on an anti-Islam campaign to discredit and isolate mainstream American Muslim organizations.
Hardliners are engaged in cynical efforts to undermine the work of mainstream organizations who have been working for decades to develop Muslim institutions to nurture the needs of the growing American Muslim community, help the community integrate into the larger American society, and protect the civil rights and liberties of Muslims. Hardliners are busy in inventing Muslim organizations whose main missions are to roll back American Muslim achievements.
Daniel Pipes, whose whole carrier is built on bashing Muslims and confusing the public through half truths and innuendos, is yet to find moderate Muslim organizations or leaders. He has accused every Muslim organization and leader of repute of extremism, militancy, and radicalism. His list of militant organizations includes: The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Muslim American Society (MAS), and others. Muslim organizations have for years been the subject of his attacks and accusations. He, most recently, added the newly founded Progressive Muslim Union of North America (PMUNA) and the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) to the list.
Pipes collaborates with a group of off-centrists that includes David Horowitz, Kenneth Timmerman, Steve Emerson, and Steven Schwartz in attacking Islam and Muslims. The group employs smear tactics of “quotes taken out of context, guilt by association, errors of fact, and innuendo,” and utilizes neo-conservative publications such as the Daily and Weekly Standards, National Review, Insight, and Front Page Magazine, to coordinate their attacks.
Pipes’s mean-spirited and bigoted attacks against Muslim organizations came to the fore few months ago when he embarked on a smear campaign against the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID). Using his leverage as a member of the board of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), he pressed hard to cancel a seminar the Institute organized jointly with CSID. Pipes accused CSID of being “part of the militant Islamist lobby,” and contended that it was “well-disguised, and has brought in all the Islamist trends, giving them a patent of respectability.”
After conducting a thorough investigation of Pipes’s claims, USIP issued a statement that brought out the irresponsible nature of Pipes’s attacks. “The Institute was aware of and took seriously the accusations made against CSID and some of the speakers at the event,” Kay King, the director of Congressional and Public Affairs at USIP. “These allegations were investigated carefully with credible private individuals and U.S. government agencies,” she went on, “and found to be without merit. The public criticism of CSID and the speakers was found to be based on quotes taken out of context, guilt by association, errors of fact, and innuendo.” Pipes was defiant in the face of USIP’s rebuke, contending that “President [George W.] Bush appointed [him] to the USIP board in part to serve as a watchdog against militant Islamic groups.” He was ultimately pushed out from the USIP’s board as his recess nomination was not renewed.”
Failing to isolate Muslim organizations and to scare them off, the Anti-Islam campaign is now testing the old strategy of divide and conquer with the Muslim community. Pipes has procured seed funds for a new organization whose main mission is to recruit “moderate Muslims” to undermine leading Muslim organizations. The Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP), led by Steven Schwartz, who serves as its executive director, was created to serve as “a think tank that challenges the dominance of American Muslim life by militant Islamist groups,” the Center’s mission statement reads.
CIP executive director does show profound appreciation of Pipes’s moral and financial support, and is fully committed to his agenda and completely behold to his jargon. Jim Lobe states, in a report that came out couple of month ago, that Pipes was “working with Stephen Schwartz on a new Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP) whose aims are to ‘promote moderate Islam in the U.S. and globally’ and ‘to oppose the influence of militant Islam, and, in particular, the Saudi-funded Wahhabi sect of Islam, among American Muslims, in the America media, in American education … and with U.S. governmental bodies.’”
“The ‘extremists,’ according to the CIP proposal, are mainly represented by the ‘Wahhabi lobby,’ an array of organizations consisting of CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), as well as ‘secular’ groups, including the Arab-American Institute (AAI) and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).”
Having failed to find moderate Muslims, Pipes and company is now ready to invent them. The great irony, though, is that those who are busy producing moderate Muslims have long time ago moved from the center to the ideological fringes of the American society. The fact that they are still able to procure funds to finance their hate mongering business speaks volumes to the deep seated prejudices against Islam and Muslims that lurk among Religious Right groups who finance and support both their public and furtive operations.
The pundits leading the anti-Islam campaign will continue their business as usual, and are unlikely to be deterred by a limited exposure of their deception and distortion. The exposure must be complete. The American Muslim Community cannot, however, continue doing business as usual. It must take responsibility for the fact that Muslim bashers are exploiting its inability to mount a strong response to stop those who are digging under its feet. More specifically, American Muslims must intensify their efforts and take more seriously their work in the following areas:
1. Building national institutions and supporting organizations engaged in building leadership capacity within the Muslim community, and defending the rights and dignity of American Muslims.
2. Joining hands with local and national organizations that provide public services, and channeling its human and financial resources to serve the larger American public.
3. Coordinating their activities so as to avoid duplication and bickering, and to act in unison in face of those who espouse ill-will and ill-intentions toward Islam and American Muslims.
Jim Lobe reported in 2005 that
Pipes is also working with Stephen Schwartz on a new Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP) whose aims are to “promote moderate Islam in the U.S. and globally” and “to oppose the influence of militant Islam, and, in particular, the Saudi-funded Wahhabi sect of Islam, among American Muslims, in the America media, in American education … and with U.S. governmental bodies.”
Schwartz, a former Trotskyite militant who became a Sufi Muslim in 1997, has received seed money from MEF (Middle East Forum), which is also accepting contributions on CIP’s behalf until the government gives it tax-exempt legal status, according to another grant proposal obtained by IPS.
The CIP proposal, which says it expects to receive funding from contributors in the “American Shia community” and in “Sunni mosques once liberated from Wahhabi influence,” also boasts “strong links” with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other notable neoconservatives, such as former Central Intelligence (CIA) director James Woolsey and the vice president for foreign policy programming at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Danielle Pletka, as well as with Pipes himself.
Pipes, who created MEF in Philadelphia in 1994, has long campaigned against “radical” Islamists in the United States, especially the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and several other national Islamic groups.
… Pipes’ complementary goal – to enhance the influence of “moderate” Muslims – is to guide the work of Schwartz’s CIP, which is “headed by one born Muslim (its President) and a ‘new Muslim’, i.e. an American not born in the faith, as its Executive Director. This is the best combination for leading such an effort.”
The “extremists,” according to the CIP proposal, are mainly represented by the “Wahhabi lobby,” an array of organizations consisting of CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), as well as “secular” groups, including the Arab-American Institute (AAI) and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
“The first goal of CIP will be the removal of CAIR and ISNA from monopoly status in representing Muslims to the American public,” the proposal goes on. “[S]o long as they retain a major foothold at the highest political level, no progress can be made for moderate American Islam.”
In achieving its goal, CIP cites the help it can expect from its “strong links” to Wolfowitz, Woolsey, and Pletka; as well as Senators Charles Schumer and Sen. Jon Kyl, among others, “terrorism experts” Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project, Paul Marshall of Freedom House, and Glen Howard of the Jamestown Foundation; and journalists such as Fox News anchors David Asman, Brit Hume, and Greta van Susteren, Dale Hurd of the Christian Broadcasting Network; and editors at the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Toronto Globe and Mail.

source: http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/stephen_schwartz_center_on_islamic_pluralism/0018441

Continue reading »]]> By DAVID YONKE
BLADE RELIGION EDITOR

“When Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments in tow, little did he know that Americans would end up being their single greatest fan,” Jenna Weissman Joselit, keynote speaker at the 11th Annual Jewish-Christian-Muslim Dialogue, said.

Her lecture, “Double-Edged: America’s Relationship to the Ten Commandments,” was Wednesday evening at the University of Toledo.

Ms. Weissman Joselit, a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University in Washington, presented a Jewish view of the Ten Commandments and U.S. culture.

After her 40-minute talk, the Rev. Denise Baker gave reflections from a Christian perspective and Fatima Al-Hayani gave a Muslim view.

All three mentioned the delicate balance of fitting Judeo-Christian scriptures into a diverse U.S. society whose Constitution mandates church-state separation.

Ms. Weissman Joselit told the crowd of about 200 that the Decalogue — which God handed down to Moses and the ancient Israelites, the biblical book of Exodus says — has been uniquely embraced by modern U.S. society.

The “biblical do’s and don’ts” were “enshrined in the national pantheon of words to live by, along with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address,” she said. “The citizens of the United States made the Ten Commandments their own.”

Starting in the 1850s, the Decalogue “migrated from churches and Sunday schools into the public square,” and was used to “assuage the nation’s growing pains.”

The term “Ten Commandments” became a generic title for everything from beauty tips to driving lessons, she said. They’re on tattoos, lithographs, and bracelets. Politicians including Teddy Roosevelt cited them to religious-minded voters. And they were dramatized on the silver screen by movie producer Cecil B. DeMille, first in a 1927 silent film and again in 1956 in a four-hour epic starring Charlton Heston.

As the Ten Commandments became “Americanized,” they became “less Jewish,” she said.

For Jews, the Ten Commandments are just one of many important biblical precepts, she said. Jews did not protest the appropriation of the Ten Commandments by American culture, but rather took it as a sign of mainstream acceptance of their religious and ethnic minority.

Ms. Weissman Joselit said she wanted to highlight “the porousness between religion and culture in modern America and to showcase the imaginative and creative processes by which a religious document like the Ten Commandments becomes something else again.”

Ms. Baker, the executive director of Toledo Campus Ministry, said many Protestant Christians have “forgotten the Jewish history of the Ten Commandments and appropriated it as their own.” Now the challenge is to “improve our understanding” and to “live out the Ten Commandments as a uniting force,” not as a polarizing political issue.

Ms. Al-Hayani, principal of the Islamic School of Greater Toledo, said the Ten Commandments are “exclusive” in that they are found only in the Jewish and Christian holy books. She said references to them in America is “a negation of cultural diversity,” and urged more inclusiveness, citing parallel commandments in the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book.

Contact David Yonke at: dyonke@theblade.com or 419-724-6154.

source: http://toledoblade.com/Religion/2011/04/09/3-faiths-have-dialogue-over-Decalogue-at-event.html

Continue reading »]]> Tuesday, March 29, 2011

NEW ORLEANS, LA — (Marketwire) — 03/29/11 — More than 40 New Orleans Muslim, Jewish and Christian clergy from a spectrum of denominations and movements joined the convention of the world’s Reform rabbis to engage in a dialogue on potentially divisive texts, utilizing them as an avenue for exploring wider issues.

The goal of the event, which took place at the 122nd annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), was to renew mutual understanding and reach new insights about interreligious approaches to addressing societal problems and advancing civil society.

The New Orleans clergy sat in circles with attendees of the convention, which includes 500 Reform rabbis from all over North America. (CCAR is the professional organization of nearly 2,000 Reform rabbis, the world’s largest group of Jewish clergy.) The starting point of each discussion was a critical look at select texts, including Ecclesiastes 12 and 13, Galatians 3, Babylonian Talmud Berkhot 6b, Qur’An 9:5 (Repentance) and Qur’An 3:110 (Family of Imran).

Among the reflections shared:

We are not alone in struggling with our own texts. Clergy of different faiths find commonalities in shared struggles.

Dialogue is particularly valuable in our divisive era.

Religious leaders of different faiths experience the same God, but in distinct ways.

Interreligious dialogue elevates a spirit of cooperation, which is especially important, given the destructiveness of intolerance.

Openness is extraordinary and brings a deeper appreciation of other denominations and movements.

Event leaders included Rabbi Robert H. Loewy of Congregation Gates of Prayer in Metairie, LA; Imam Omar Suleiman, Imam of Masjid Abu Bakr (Jefferson Muslim Association) in New Orleans; Reverend Don Frampton, Senior Pastor of St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church in New Orleans; Rabbi Denise L. Eger, Rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood, CA.

This program was made possible by the generous support of the Leichtag Family Foundation as well as Men for Reform Judaism.

Note to Journalists: To attend the CCAR Convention, obtain schedule of events or to arrange a conversation with the leaders of the CCAR, please contact Itay Engelman at Sommerfield Communications at 212-255-8386 or itay@sommerfield.com.

About the Central Conference of American Rabbis 2011 Convention

The 122nd annual Central Conference American Rabbis convention is taking place in New Orleans, Louisiana, through March 30. More than 500 Reform Rabbis have gathered to share plans to build and maintain communities. Highlights include sessions on interfaith dialogue, sustainability and custodianship of the Earth.

About The CCAR

The Central Conference of American Rabbis, founded in 1889, is the oldest and largest rabbinic organization in North America. As the professional organization for Reform Rabbis, the CCAR projects a powerful voice in the religious life of the American and international Jewish communities. The CCAR has a rich history of giving professional and personal support to Reform rabbis, providing them opportunities for study, professional development and spiritual growth throughout their careers, and into retirement. The CCAR is uniquely positioned to meet the ever-changing needs of the Reform Jewish community. For more information please visit the CCAR’s website at http://ccarnet.org/.

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Contact:
Itay Engelman
Sommerfield Communications, Inc.
212-255-8386
itay@sommerfield.com

source: http://www.istockanalyst.com/business/news/5017416/forty-new-orlinian-christian-muslim-and-jewish-clergy-engage-over-each-other-s-texts-and-the-challenges-they-present

Continue reading »]]> By IRIE PRICE
March 26, 2011
AVALANCHE-JOURNAL

“First and foremost, it is a perspective of the word becoming flesh,” said Jim Beck, professor of Missions and Bible at Lubbock Christian University and missions coordinator at Monterey Church of Christ.
“I think more about sharing my personal experience and my sense of spirituality,” said Rabbi Vicki Hollander of Congregation Shaareth Israel.
“I think Christians, they don’t want to just share the Gospel, they want to change hearts,” posited Glenn Austell, area director for the evangelical ministry Young Life.
With such divergent views of what it means to share one’s faith, many people are understandably hesitant to discuss their beliefs. The phrase “sharing faith” generates images as violent as the Crusades, and as benign as the conversations in interfaith panels. When embarking on a faith-sharing conversation, some people are not sure what kind of conversation they will be in for.
Even some contacted for this article showed their unease with the topic. Several atheists, for example, were nervous enough about discussing their world view to request anonymity before agreeing to an interview. Another interviewee responded by email to gather his thoughts before broaching the subject. Yet another expressed concern at the end of the interview that his words be placed in their spoken context, lest he be misunderstood.
Nine religious leaders and experts spoke with The Avalanche-Journal about faith sharing, and imparted wisdom about wading into what Austell called “those deep waters of dialogue.”
‘We are not here to convert each other’
One the reason the phrase “sharing faith” raises eyebrows is its seeming similarity to proselytizing.
“The edgy part is, you know, when I’ve had the random time when someone was trying to convince me to leave my tradition for theirs,” Hollander said.
“And that was not OK for me because I have a very deep attachment to my tradition.”
“I want people to know Christ,” Austell acknowledged. But, he added, “Is it my job to change their hearts? No. the Holy Spirit is going to do that.”
“If they respond to that, great. If they don’t respond to that, guess what? We’re going to keep loving them anyway, and keep chasing after them,” Austell said.
Imam Samer Altabaa of the Islamic Center of the South Plains holds a similar view.
“We believe that when a person converts, it comes from God,” Altabaa said.
“My mission is to convey the message of God to (non-Muslims),” he added. “We have to convey, not convert.”
He said he did not always feel that way. When Altabaa was first invited to an interfaith panel 11 years ago, he saw it as a prime opportunity to convert the other religious leaders.
“I tried to convince everyone with my faith,” Altabaa said, laughing at his younger self. “And people were very respectful.”
But after the meeting, a Christian minister pulled him aside and said, “Imam, we are not here to convert each other. … We are here in this meeting to know about each other and find out what we have in common and work together for our communities.”
That experience challenged Altabaa to study what the Quran says about interacting with non-Muslims. A group of verses from Surah 109.2-6 proved pivotal for his views on the matter. A translation of the verses reads, “I do not worship what you worship. Nor are you worshippers of what I worship. … For you is your religion, and for me is my religion.”
Beck also looks to his holy book for guidance in conversations about faith.
“I don’t see where Jesus went around saying to ‘Accept me,’ ” Beck said. He said Jesus’ method was of sharing faith was more invitational than coercive: “Follow me.”
“We think we’re supposed to convict the world,” Beck said.
“If I read it right,” he said of a verse in John 14, “we were commissioned to love and the Spirit of God will convict.”

‘I’m looking for an open door’
Timing is everything when it comes to sharing one’s faith, said many of those interviewed.
Movie theater urinals, wild fraternity parties and busy airport corridors were all named as inopportune times for discussion. But sitting next to someone on an airplane? That could prove fitting, said the Rev. David Wilson, pastor of Southcrest Baptist Church.
“To me it’s always appropriate (to share my faith),” Wilson said, “but it’s not always the right time.
“I’m looking for an open door,” he explained.
Those open doors come more easily in established relationships, according to many of those interviewed.
“Demonstrate consistency, faithfulness, in their world,” advised Austell, whose life’s work is sharing his faith with high school and college students. He noted the importance of shared experiences in establishing trust and limiting offense.
Austell said, “You look up one day and this great bridge of trust has been built. … When the time is right, we cross that bridge with the Gospel. We’ve earned the right to be heard.”
Wilson called such moments of sharing faith through relationships “relational evangelism.”
“Maybe there has to be that element of trust,” Wilson said.
Trust is such an important element that Hollander does most of her faith-sharing only after a person has “asked me or they’ve shown they’re desirous of speaking on that level.”
“Just as I wouldn’t walk into someone’s house (without an invitation) so I wouldn’t walk into an exchange without that invitation,” Hollander said.

‘Don’t bruise the fruit’
Even with an open invitation at conversation, there exists the possibility of offense when discussing matters as weighty as spiritual truth and eternal salvation. For some, offense may come with the territory.
“This concept of offense matters little in a world where you are perceived as carrying out the divine will,” said Saad Abi-Hamad, assistant professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History at Texas Tech.
The Rev. Chris Galanos, pastor of Experience Life Church, acknowledged his views of Christ’s message might rankle.
“When you share the truths of the Gospel, sometimes people are going to be offended because truth is, by definition, narrow and exclusive,” Galanos said.
“A Christian can’t ultimately control whether the truths of the Gospel offend someone, but what they can control is how they present them. The Bible teaches that we should present the truth in love.”
Abi-Hamad, who is not Muslim, said intentions can go a long way in faith-sharing endeavors. “Generally, if you’re attempting to be respectful (and) sensitive, people will forgive you a lot.”
But, he said, “If you insist, then you become offensive.”
Austell put it bluntly. “I’m not going to get in some shouting match. ‘Your religion’s weird! My religion’s awesome! So stick it!’ ”
”What I would be privileged to do is enter into a friendship, not with some agenda, but because God has called me to love people,” Austell said.
To that end, Altabaa and Wilson each advised that people not disparage each other’s beliefs in faith discussions.
“Don’t bruise the fruit,” Wilson recommended.
Within Christianity, where churches sometimes disagree over the meaning of certain Scriptures, faith sharing can certainly make for some bruised fruit; one need look no further than the Reformation for evidence of that.
Beck said that when he tries to share his faith to Christians with political or economic power, listeners sometimes bristle.
“If you want to see (Jesus) get offensive,” said Beck, look at Jesus’ interactions and language concerning the rich or powerful.
A message that requires those with means to rethink their status can be off-putting, Beck said. He cautioned that whether one is speaking to a person from another faith or from one’s own faith, the underlying approach should be the same.
“Make sure we love them first.”
Mary Vines, who has facilitated the Lubbock Interfaith Dialogue meetings since 1985, aims for a similarly graceful approach when engaging others about their faith.
“I think we all have to examine ourselves,” Vines said. “We’re all on a journey in sharing our faith.”

To comment on this story:
irie.price@lubbockonline.com • 766-8796

source: http://lubbockonline.com/faith/2011-03-26/dont-bruise-fruit-sharing-faith-without-offending

Continue reading »]]> by MARC SCHNEIER
03/21/2011

“Even when we do not share a common faith, we share a common fate, and our single destiny must strengthen our bonds of concern, compassion and caring for each other.”

In the March 17 edition, Isi Liebler, in his column “A Jewish-Muslim alliance?”alleged that the activities to promote mutual understanding and tolerance with moderate Muslim leaders with which I am involved are wrongheaded and antithetical to the interests of world Jewry.

Despite the tone of the column, which appears to argue that efforts at building Muslim-Jewish partnerships is dangerous to the well-being of Jews, the successes we have achieved in building ties of friendship and trust are authentic. We have inspired Muslim and Jewish leaders to speak out in defense of the other.

For example, Imam Shamsi Ali, spiritual leader of the largest and most prominent mosque in New York, with whom I am coauthoring a book on Judaism and Islam, made unmistakably clear that the Jewish-Muslim alliance we have worked so hard to create is, in reality, a two-way street. Shortly after the murderous terror attack against the Fogel family in Itamar, Ali issued a widely disseminated statement strongly condemning the attack and emphasizing, “We expect all decent people to unequivocally condemn this brutality. There is no way to contextualize this outrageous crime. Political differences never justify terrorism.”

The fact that a prominent Muslim cleric would speak out so unequivocally against a terror attack on Israelis in such a public fashion and without reservation is an important example of the willingness of top Muslim leaders to speak out for Jews in a manner that almost never occurred before we began our coalitionbuilding efforts five years ago.

Another example of the same important trend came earlier this month by another important ally of ours in the effort to strengthen Muslim-Jewish relations: Dr.

Sayyid Sayeed, national director of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest and most prestigious Muslim organization in the US and Canada.

After representatives of both Hamas and Fatah each issued vile statements on March 1 calling the Holocaust a “lie” and vowing to prevent teaching about it to Palestinian youngsters in UN-sponsored schools in Gaza, Sayeed immediately sent me a letter condemning Holocaust denial and declaring his support for young Muslims all over the world who want to become better educated concerning the bitter realities of the Holocaust.

To quote directly from Sayeed: “We at ISNA reiterate our position denouncing Holocaust denial, and we support any efforts toward teaching students the horrific consequences of this great human tragedy.”

SUCH EXPRESSIONS of Muslim sympathy are not confined to the US. Last December in Brussels, Imam Abduljalil Sajid of Britain, European representative of World Council of Muslims Interfaith Relations, opened his remarks at the first annual Gathering of European Muslim and Jewish Leaders organized by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and World Jewish Congress with a prayer dedicated to the victims of the Carmel fire in December.

I recognize that much remains to be achieved in Jewish- Muslim relations and, as the chilling Hamas and Fatah statements make clear, there is still a great deal of anti- Semitism emanating from the Arab and Muslim worlds.

However, we would be doing both our Muslim friends and allies and our own Jewish community a grave disservice if we failed to point out the growing willingness of Muslim leaders to denounce anti-Semitism and speak out in support of Jews. .

The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding has instituted programs like the Weekend of Twinnings of Mosques and Synagogues that have brought tens of thousands of Muslims and Jews in 22 countries together for joint activities that celebrate commonalities and recognize differences. Something exceedingly important is happening here, and it would be a tragic mistake if we were to forgo this historic opportunity to advance relations with moderate Muslims who oppose violence and stand with people of all backgrounds – including Jews – in opposing terrorism.

I am proud that the World Jewish Congress is working closely with us in this effort, as are hundreds of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis and many thousands of Jews around the world, including Israel.

The tragic killings in Itamar remind us how inextricably the destiny of the individual Jew is intertwined with the fate of all Jews. The tragic events in Japan stress the theme of human interdependence. Even when we do not share a common faith, we share a common fate, and our single destiny must strengthen our bonds of concern, compassion and caring for each other. This is the spirit and substance we bring to the Muslim-Jewish alliance; Muslim and Jewish leaders standing up for one another and affirming in one voice, “Bigotry against any Jew or any Muslim is an attack on all Muslims and all Jews.”

source: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=213198

Continue reading »]]> Two Jewish organizations and three Muslim groups focus on building interfaith coalition for advocacy.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

by Doug Chandler

Notwithstanding the absence of a major wave of Jewish immigration today, the country’s immigration policies remain central to the Jewish community, the president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society told a roomful of young Jewish and Muslim leaders last week.
Hundreds of thousands of foreign-born Jews are no longer migrating to the United States, as they did from the early 1880s to the early ‘20s and, again, in the 1970s and ‘80s, said Gideon Aronoff, who discussed the subject as part of a panel discussion.
But the issue of fixing the country’s immigration system proved powerful enough to bring together the young leaders of two Jewish organizations and three Muslim groups for the Feb. 28 panel discussion. Hosted by the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, a mosque on the Upper East Side, the event focused on building interfaith coalitions for immigration advocacy.
The panelists included Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, and Imam Shamsi Ali, the mosque’s spiritual leader, close friends and colleagues who helped set the tone for the event. Both clerics have long promoted Jewish-Muslim dialogue, and the rabbi’s foundation was one of the event’s sponsors.

But it fell to Aronoff to explain to the 30 or so Muslims in the room why American Jews would remain as concerned as they are by immigration policy when its direct impact on the Jewish community has diminished. In turn, immigration attorney Naveen Bhora helped give the 30 or so Jewish leaders a picture of how the nation’s broken immigration system has hurt members of the Muslim community, thousands of whom have been detained and deported in the past decade.
Aronoff traced the position of American Jews to the “core beliefs” of the Jewish community and to their “central communal interests,” both of which require them to offer kindness to the stranger.
“We must be broadly focused on the stranger in need and not solely on our responsibilities to our Jewish brothers and sisters,” Aronoff said. “Essentially, we understand that we care for the stranger not because he or she is Jewish, but because we are Jewish.”
Discussing the community’s beliefs, Aronoff noted that the Torah instructs Jews no less than 36 times to welcome, love and protect the stranger — a commandment that appears more than any other mitzvah. Jewish history also informs the commitment to help refugees and immigrants, Aronoff said, adding that “Jews are a wandering people” and that “our history is one of movement.”
As for the community’s interests, American Jews share many of the same concerns as other citizens, Aronoff suggested. Every American has a stake in the nation’s economic vitality, cohesion and identity, all of which are advanced when the country’s policies not only welcome newcomers but help integrate them, he said.
But one particular concern for the Jewish community, stemming from its small size, is the need to create allies and build coalitions, Aronoff continued. That, in turn, requires that Jews care about the needs and concerns of their partners. The country’s Jews and Muslims, he said, can and must work together to fight against measures that demonize immigrants, to reverse the hate speech that has dominated the debate and to continue the campaign for comprehensive immigration reform.
Bhora, who came to this country as an infant from Bangladesh, told her audience that the Muslim community received a “wake-up call” after 9/11, when the government began using immigration law to harass and deport Muslim immigrants “under the rubric” of national security.
As Bhora described it, the violations have taken place under the National Security Entry/Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which required all men who had entered the country before September 2002, who had come from a predominantly Muslim country and weren’t citizens, permanent residents or those granted asylum, to register themselves with their local immigration office.
Of the 80,000 people who complied with those instructions, hundreds were detained or deported, Bhora said — the vast majority for violations that had nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity. And since all those deported were men, she said, their wives and children had to fend for themselves, some of them winding up in homeless shelters.
That part of the NSEERS program, known as call-in registration, lasted only a year, but the program continues to stop certain categories of non-immigrants at ports of entry — primarily on the basis of their nation of origin.
Men from predominantly Muslim countries are routinely stopped for interrogations that can last anywhere from two hours, if they’re lucky, to six hours, if they’re not, said one expert on the subject, Edward Alden, author of “The Closing of the American Border.” Nearly all American-Muslim families have been affected by the system, including Bhora’s. Her husband, a Pakistani-born surgeon who’s been in this country for many years, goes through the same lengthy interrogation each time he leaves or enters the United States, she said.
Like Aronoff, Bhora also discussed the lengthy wait times for foreign nationals applying for permanent visas — at least six years for skilled workers or professionals, all of whom have job offers or backing from American firms, and at least 11 years for the siblings of U.S. citizens. The lengthy wait prompts many highly qualified people to leave the country, while forcing others to overstay their temporary visas.
Last week’s event may signify a trend among the young leaders of Jewish organizations, said Walter Ruby, the discussion’s moderator and the Muslim-Jewish relations program officer at the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. More and more often, he suggested, Jewish young leadership groups are meeting with counterparts from other religious and ethnic communities.
Sponsors of last week’s event included HIAS Young Leaders, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Generation R, a group of young, Russian-speaking Jews affiliated with the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. William Dawoodi, a member of the HIAS group, came up with the idea of such a meeting.
In another note of Muslim-Jewish cooperation, Imam Shamsi Ali said the name for a March 6 rally in Times Square — “I Am a Muslim, Too” — was suggested by Rabbi Schneier. The rally, organized by a coalition of interfaith and progressive groups, protested congressional hearings called by Rep. Peter King (R-L.I.), scheduled to start this week, to examine the “radicalization” of American Muslims.
Those facts aside, one observer at last week’s event said he fears the mistrust that has developed between the Muslim community and other Americans.
Robert Kaplan, director of intergroup relations at the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, said he has no doubt that home-grown terrorism really exists, making some of the mistrust well-founded. But in other cases, he added, the mistrust has no basis and could “hinder communities from working together to enable everyone to share in the American experience.”

source: http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_york/young_jewish_muslim_leaders_join_immigration_issue

Continue reading »]]> by Lesley Hazleton

March 8, 2011

This past weekend, I spoke to a Hadassah meeting – the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. The subject, of my choosing, was “What’s a ‘nice Jewish girl’ doing writing so much about Islam?”

The easy answer to the question I’d self-imposed was “Why not?” A perfectly reasonable answer, perhaps, but not with bigots like Peter King about to begin his witch hunt this week in the form of congressional hearings on the alleged “radicalization” of American Muslims.
The real answer is that it’s precisely because I’m Jewish that I find myself writing so much about Islam these days. Because as a Jew, I know the dangers of prejudice. And I can smell it a mile off. When I hear someone talk about “the Jewish mentality,” I know I’m listening to an anti-Semite. How else stereotype millions of people that way? Just as when I read someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking about “the Muslim mentality,” I know — no matter how pretty she is, how soft-spoken, and how compelling her life story – that I am listening to an Islamophobe.
And I recognize that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the exact same coin: the stereotyping of millions of people by the actions of a few. That is, prejudice.
So it’s particularly painful, let alone absurd and self-defeating and dumb, to see that some Islamophobes are Jewish. And equally painful – and absurd and self-defeating and dumb – to see that some Muslims are anti-Semitic.
I have no statistics to say what proportion of Jews are Islamophobic or what proportion of Muslims are anti-Semitic (though I could doubtless make some up and throw them out there with such an air of authority that they’d be repeated ad infinitum until they achieve the status of “fact”). But the Muslim Brotherhood, for all the changes it has undergone, still distributes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And while anti-Zionism does not necessarily mean anti-Semitism, there is a clear overlap, with a venemous hatred finding its outlet in what is now the more acceptable form of anti-Zionism.
So we need to be clear. We badly need it.
“Islam” did not attack the US on 9/11; eighteen people with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Islam did. “The Jews” do not shoot Palestinian farmers in the West Bank; Bible-spouting settlers with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Judaism do.
The Quran is no more violent or misogynistic than the Bible. In fact it’s less so. If you insist, as Islamophobes do, on highlighting certain phrases, then you should turn around and do the same with the Bible, which you will find ten times worse, with repeated calls for the destruction of whole peoples. Only the dumbest, most literal, hate-filled fundamentalist, Jewish or Muslim, takes the rules of ancient warfare as a guide to 21st-century life.
We have to stop this stereotyping. Now. All of us.
We have to recognize prejudice not only in others, but in ourselves, Jewish or Muslim.
We have to be able to see that the anti-Semitic trope of “the Jews” trying to take over the world is exactly the same as the Islamophobic one of “the Muslims” trying to take over the world.
We have to acknowledge that an Islamophobic Jew is thinking exactly like an anti-Semite. And that an anti-Semitic Muslim is thinking exactly like an Islamophobe.
We have to realize that American Jews need to stand up with Muslims against Islamophobia just as American Muslims need to stand up with Jews against anti-Semitism.
Because Islamophobia is, in essence, another form of anti-Semitism, and vice versa. And it’s in the direct interest of both Jews and Muslims — of all of us — to stand up and confront both forms of prejudice.
In the famous words of an anti-Nazi Protestant pastor during World War II:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

source: http://accidentaltheologist.com/2011/03/08/anti-semitism-islamophobia/

Continue reading »]]> by Rabbi Mark A. Gruber and Sister Jeanne Clark
March 8, 2011

As Long Island faith leaders from different religious traditions, we fear that Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) congressional hearings about the “radicalization” of the Muslim community will demonize Muslim Americans, undermine interfaith dialogue and distract us from practical efforts to confront violent extremism.

We stand together with a broad spectrum of religious and secular leaders who believe that fighting terrorism does not require compromising our nation’s core values and highest ideals. In our experience volunteering and breaking bread with Muslims on Long Island, we are inspired by our neighbors’ commitment to worship in peace and pursue the American dream. We have visited mosques in an effort to understand our Muslim brothers and sisters’ beliefs and proud traditions. We have seen their dedication to serve others, especially those with few resources, and have worked together as Jews, Christians and Muslims to speak on behalf of peace and nonviolent solutions to conflicts. Muslims are doctors and teachers, police officers and business owners. They are a part of our American family and should be treated with dignity.

Sadly, these misguided hearings have the potential to inflame a toxic climate of Islamophobia now common in our community and across the country. On Long Island, Muslims often face discrimination. Some Muslim women who because of their faith wear the hijab (head covering) are afraid to go to the grocery store alone. Recently, in an affluent Long Island neighborhood, an email circulated throughout the community warning people that a terrorist had moved into the neighborhood. Muslim children in a local school were shunned by students. This prejudice diminishes us all and undermines our nation’s commitment to equality and religious pluralism.

Despite false perceptions shaped by stereotypes, Muslim-American leaders have consistently denounced terrorism and worked with law enforcement to prevent violence. In recent months, Muslims foiled attempted bombings in Times Square and Portland, Ore. Building and maintaining trust with the Muslim community is crucial to furthering this cooperation. Political spectacles and demagoguery that demean an entire religious community are wrong and do not make us safer. We encourage Congressman King to choose a more constructive approach to strengthening the bonds of trust that bolster our security and protect our values by convening a dialogue between faith leaders, law enforcement and elected officials.

Although Congressman King has insisted that his hearings will focus on Islamic extremism, his own rhetoric suggests that he will cast a cloud of suspicion over the entire Muslim community. He told a radio host that 80 percent of mosques are led by radicals and once described Muslims as “an enemy living amongst us.” As Jews and Catholics have learned throughout American history, sweeping accusations have tragic consequences. Entire communities should never be targeted by overzealous leaders in the name of patriotism. During World War II, Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps because of broad suspicion of disloyalty. The McCarthy hearings of the 1950′s became a national spectacle that falsely impugned the loyalty and destroyed the lives of many Americans. Catholics were once viewed as threats to democracy beholden to a foreign power. Jews have faced centuries of suspicion and prejudice. This shameful history should teach us to never again demonize an American simply because of race, religion or culture.
Leaders across the political spectrum agree that we must work together to prevent terrorist attacks. Our opposition to Rep. King’s hearings isn’t motivated by “political correctness” or a naïve belief that evil does not exist in the world. Rather, we call for a more constructive approach because we fear these hearings will undermine practical approaches to this profound challenge and threaten our most inspiring ideals as a nation.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-mark-a-gruber/muslim-hearings-commentar_b_832857.html

Continue reading »]]> By Rebecca Ginat
February 28, 2011

Prolific educator, lawyer and Muslim scholar, Najeeba Syeed-Miller began her presentation by citing the theory of deprovincialisation. Deprovincialisation is when “we see the other, hear the other and understand where they are coming from,” said Syeed-Miller. “This is what we are here to accomplish today.” And indeed, after the February 7th conference on the subject of “Changing Roles? Women in Traditional Jewish & Muslim Communities,” it is fair to say that each respective ‘other’ was seen and heard. Indeed, many attendees left remarking on the striking commonalities the two religions share with regards to women’s issues.
After a two year hiatus, with a history of fascinating and well attended programming, the Jewish-Muslim Initiative – in conjunction with the International Studies Program and the Institute for the Humanities at UIC – chose the “Changing Roles?” conference to be its big ‘kick-off event.’
Dr. Samuel Fleishacker, director of Jewish Studies and conference organizer, cited an NPR radio broadcast as the spark that helped this event begin to take formation. After listening to a radio program about the veil this past summer, Fleishacker said that he “began to think about similar these discussions were to discussions taking place within the Jewish community. I think there are a lot of Jewish and Muslim women who would like these issues to be addressed more, issues that typically don’t get that much attention.”
And based on reactions from both Jewish and Muslim students, Fleishacker definitely seems to be on the right track. Shaina Campbell, a senior majoring in psychology, said that she was “surprised by just how similar [the two religions] are, especially in the ways that both are currently evolving. On such a diverse campus, it’s unfortunate we don’t have more opportunities for dialogue.” Noor Khourshid, a senior majoring in Latin American studies, expressed a similar sentiment: “it’s important to focus on [women in traditional Islam and Judaism] because of the misinterpretations that one often hears about women in both groups. Showcasing the many similarities between Jewish and Muslim women is one more step to bridge the gap between our two people.”
The UIC Jewish-Muslim Initiative hopes to continue to provide diverse programming focusing on the rich history of Jewish-Muslim relations, in addition to offering Postdoctoral Fellowship enabling candidates to teach classes on both Judaism and Islam. “Parents in both communities are having similar issues while watching their children integrating into American culture,” Fleishacker remarked. “There are cultural and historical issues; women’s issues; even something as basic as the search and availability of kosher or halal food.” There is certainly no dearth of subject matter to be discussed.
Some might note the presupposed elephant sitting, quite and composed, in the midst of any Jewish-Muslim dialogue. Namely: Israel. Fleishacker emphasized that the Initiative is not suggesting that Israel should “never be discussed; however, by immediately jumping to Israel, one instantaneously creates a level of tension that is then very hard to get past.” Fleishacker continued, saying that “it’s important to first look at other areas where Jews and Muslims share,” in an effort to establish a strong and open relationship between the two groups.
As students, Ms. Campbell remarked that, “we should take advantage of the incredible resource offered through our schools diversity, by creating more opportunities for dialogue between our two groups.”
And with assurances of future programming from the Jewish-Muslim Initiative, and judging by the dynamic presentations from the compelling panel of speakers at the “Changing Roles?” conference, future events promise to create many more worthwhile opportunities for dialogue.
If interested in becoming involved in a student lead Jewish-Muslim initiative, please contact myself (Rebecca Ginat) at rginat2@uic.edu or Shaina Campbell at scampb5@uic.edu.

source: http://www.chicagoflame.com/features/initiative-relaunched-1.2021104

Continue reading »]]> The regular dialogue the two faiths have maintained since the Catholic Church renounced anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council, should be “a model for transformed relations with Islam,” Rabbi Richard Marker told an interfaith conference.

Marker addressed the opening session on Sunday evening of a meeting reviewing four decades of Catholic-Jewish efforts to forge closer ties after 1,900 years of Christian anti-Semitism and to ask how the dialogue can progress in the future.

“Forty years in the histories of two great world religions is but a blink of an eye,” Marker, chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation, said. “But 40 years of a relationship is a sign of its maturity.”

“The focus of the world is no longer specifically on Jewish- Christian amity. We must, for so many reasons, involve the third of our Abrahamic siblings… Islam.”

Major faiths have held countless bilateral meetings to foster better ties since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) launched the world’s largest church on the path of dialogue.

Christian and Jewish leaders increasingly meet their Muslim counterparts to seek common ground and better understanding, but none of these discussions have the history or depth of the Catholic-Jewish dialogue officially begun in 1971.

In those 40 years, the Catholic Church has apologized for its sins against the Jewish people and recognized Judaism as its spiritual “elder brother,” a step that Jewish leaders praise as a historic change in perspective.

DIALOGUE NOT ALWAYS EASY

The dialogue has not always been easy. There is still much mutual misunderstanding at the grass-roots level and Jewish leaders are quick to criticize the Vatican over divisive topics, especially related to the Holocaust.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, the Vatican’s top official for relations with Judaism, told the meeting that Pope Benedict’s three visits to synagogues were more than those of any other pope.

Benedict has also been harshly criticized by Jews for ending the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop and promoting sainthood for Pope Pius XII, who Jews allege did not do enough to save their people from the Nazis during World War Two.

Paris Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, host of the four-day meeting, said Catholics and Jews had come to know each other as friends over the 40 years of dialogue.

“Of course, we must make sure … that anti-Semitism is unambiguously exposed as a sin against God and humanity, for anti-Semitism is unfortunately not dead,” he told the meeting.

During the meeting, participants will plant a tree in memory of Ilan Halimi, a French Jew killed by an anti-Semitic gang in 2006, and visit the Drancy camp outside Paris where the Nazis sent French Jews to death camps during World War Two.

The Grand Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, said the reconciliation between Jews and Catholics in recent decades was unprecedented but might not continue if it did not develop.

“Many Jews have organized Jewish-Catholic dialogue so it is totally focused on what we Jews think are Christian failures,” he said. “This situation cannot continue much longer.”

Catholic officials were unlikely to want to continue such a one-sided dialogue, he said, and some Jews see the need to define their role in an increasingly pluralist world.

“Jews will not compromise their religious integrity … by saying that Christians can be models for us not despite their Christian faith but because of their Christian faith,” he said.

source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/02/28/us-religion-dialogue-catholic-jewish-idUKTRE71R4RE20110228?pageNumber=2

Continue reading »]]> by Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick

The Universality and Uniqueness of Prophecy

Prophecy is the means whereby God offers guidance to human beings through human intermediaries. Just as God’s mercy takes precedence over his wrath and thereby determines the nature of wrath, so also God’s guidance takes precedence over his misguidance. Guidance itself demands the existence of misguidance. Without the misguidance that is embodied by Satan, the prophetic messages would be meaningless. Without distance, there can be no nearness; without wrong, no right; without darkness, no perception of light. All the distinctions that allow for a cosmos to exist depend upon the diversification and differentiation of the divine qualities. On the moral and spiritual level, this diversification becomes manifest through the paths of guidance and misguidance, represented by the prophets and the satans.

Wherever there have been prophets, there have been satans. The Koran uses the word satans to refer both to some of the jinn and to some human beings. To be a satan is to be an enemy of the prophets and an embodiment of misguidance:

We have appointed to every prophet an enemy-satans from among mankind and jinn, revealing fancy words to each other as delusion. Yet, had thy Lord willed, they would never have done it. So leave them with what they are fabricating. (Quran 6:112)

Just as Adam, our father and the first prophet, was faced with Iblis, so also we are faced with Iblis, his offspring, and their followers. Misguidance is a universal phenomenon, found in the outside world and within ourselves. In the same way, guidance is a universal phenomenon. In other words, the human race is inconceivable without both prophets and satans, because human beings are defined by the freedom they received when they were made in the divine form. They are able to choose among the divine attributes, because all the divine attributes are found within themselves. Just as they can choose God’s right hand by following guidance, so also they can choose his left hand by following misguidance. Without that choice, they would not have been free to accept the Trust.

As we have seen, the fundamental message of the prophets is tawhid. In the Islamic perspective, all prophets have brought the first Shahadah: “We never sent a messenger before thee save that We revealed to him, saying, There is no god but I, so worship Me’” (Quran 21:25). In contrast to the first Shahadah, which designates a divine guidance that is embodied by all prophets, the second Shahadah refers to the domain of the specific message brought by Muhammad. Other prophets had their own messages that correspond to the second Shahadah:

Every nation has its messenger. (Quran 10:47)

We have sent no messenger save with the tongue of his people. (Quran 14:4)

To every one of you [messengers] We have appointed a right way and an open road. (Quran 5:48)

The Koran insists that Muslims should not differentiate among the prophets of God. Each prophet, after all, was sent by God with guidance, and the primary message of each is the same:

Say: We have faith in God, and in that which has been sent down on Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Tribes, and that which was given to Moses and Jesus and the prophets by their Lord. We make no distinction among any of them, and to Him we have submitted. (Quran 2:136; cf. 2:285, 3:84)

The Koran tells us in several verses that the later prophets came to confirm the messages of the earlier prophets:

And when Jesus son of Mary said, “Children of Israel, I am indeed God’s messenger to you, confirming the Torah that has gone before me… .”(Quran 61:6)

He has sent down upon thee the Book with the truth, confirming what was before it, and He sent down the Torah and the Gospel aforetime, as guidance to the people. (Quran 3:3)

At the same time, the Koran makes clear that the details of the messages differ. Any distinction that can be made among the messengers has to be made on the basis of the difference in their messages:

And those messengers-some We have preferred above others. Among them was he to whom God spoke, and He raised some in degrees. And We gave Jesus son of Mary the clear explications, and We confirmed him with the Holy Spirit. (Quran 2:253)

And We have preferred some prophets over others, and We gave David the Psalms. (Quran 17:55)

The idea that every messenger comes with a message that is specific to the people to whom he was sent and that differs in details from other messages is deeply rooted in the Islamic consciousness and is reflected in the titles that are customarily given to the great messengers in Islamic texts. Each title designates the special quality of the messenger that distinguishes him from other messengers. Thus, one of the verses just quoted refers to him “to whom God spoke.” Most commentators think that this is a reference to Moses, to whom Islamic sources give the title kalim (speaking companion), because God spoke to him from the burning bush without the intermediary of Gabriel, and because the Koran says, “And unto Moses We spoke directly” (Quran 4:164). But the commentators add that it may also refer to Adam, to whom God spoke in the Garden, and to Muhammad, to whom God spoke during Muhammad’s ascent to God (the mir’aj). In a similar way, Jesus is usually called God’s “spirit,” and Abraham his “close friend” (khalil).

In Islamic countries, especially among people untouched by modern education, there is a common belief that all religions accept the first Shahadah, but that each religion has a specific second Shahadah that differs from that of the Muslims. Thus it is thought that the Christians say, ‘There is no god but God and Jesus is the spirit of God,” while the Jews say, ‘There is no god but God and Moses is God’s speaking companion.”

The Koran recognizes explicitly that, although the first Shahadah never changes, the domain covered by the second Shahadah differs from message to message. Hence, all the laws that are proper to Jews, for example, are not necessarily proper for Christians, nor do the rulings of the Muslim Shariah have any universality (despite the claims of some Muslims). For example, in the following verse, God explains that the Jews have prohibitions that do not apply to Muslims:

And to the Jewry We have forbidden every beast with claws; and of oxen and sheep We have forbidden them the fat of them, save what their backs carry, or their entrails, or what is mingled with the bone. (Quran 6:145)

Similarly, the Koran places the following words, which are directed at the Children of Israel, in Jesus’ mouth, thus indicating that his Shariah differs from that of Moses.

[I have been sent] to confirm the truth of the Torah that is before me, and to make lawful to you certain things that before were forbidden unto you. (Quran 3:50)

An often recited prayer at the end of Sura 2 of the Koran says, “Our Lord …, charge us not with a burden such as Thou didst lay upon those before us” (Quran 2:286). The commentators say that this refers to the Torah, which is a heavy burden, in contrast to the Muslim Shariah, which, in the words of a hadith, is “easy, congenial” (sahl samh).

One of the most delightful expressions of the differing messages entrusted to the prophets is found in the standard accounts of the Prophet’s ascent to God, the mi’raj. Muhammad met a number of prophets on his way up through the heavens. When he met God, God gave him instructions for his community. On the way back down, Muhammad stopped in each heaven to bid farewell to the prophets. In the sixth heaven, right below the seventh, he met Moses. Moses asked him what sort of acts of worship God had given him for his community. He replied that God had given him fifty salats per day. Moses told him that he had better go back and ask God to lighten the burden. He knew from sorry experience that the people would not be able to carry out such difficult instructions. The Prophet continues:

I went back, and when He had reduced them by ten, I returned to Moses. Moses said the same as before, so I went back, and when He had reduced them by ten more, I returned to Moses….

Finally, after Muhammad had moved back and forth between God and Moses several times, God reduced the salats to five. Moses then said to Muhammad:

Your people are not capable of observing five salats. I have tested people before your time and have labored earnestly to prevail over the Children of Israel. So go back to your Lord and ask Him to make things lighter for your people.

But by this point, the Prophet was too embarrassed to continue asking for reductions. Hence he said: “I have asked my Lord till I am ashamed, but now I am satisfied and I submit.”

Nowadays, discussion of Islamic teachings about prophecy can quickly raise emotions among Muslims. Probably the main reason for this is that in many Islamic countries, religion plays a far greater role in daily life than it does in Europe and America. Hence, generally speaking, political positions are posed in religious terms, and opposition to the policies of other countries can take the form of criticism of other religions.

A second factor that helps keep emotions high in discussions of prophecy is that modernized Muslims commonly take the attitude – as do many people in the West as well – that it is not they who are at fault. Shortcomings must belong to other people, and so whatever the problem may be, the blame must lie in the opponent’s court. This attitude is common throughout the world. For those who recognize the truth of myth, it is highly significant that Iblis was the first person to put the blame in the other’s court. It is he who said, “Now, because You have led me astray . . .” (Quran 7:16). If people followed the example of Adam and Eve, they would look more closely at themselves and find room to recognize that “We have wronged ourselves” (Quran 7:23).

Do not think that Iblis’s position is found only in politics. It is an everyday reality for all of us. For example, think about the way in which students react when they receive their grades. It is not uncommon to hear someone say, “I got an A in physics, but that lousy English teacher gave me a C-.” This is Iblis’s reaction-the light is mine, but he led me astray. I did good, but any evil is someone else’s fault. The reaction of Adam and Eve would be the following: “How kind of that physics teacher to give me an A, but I really messed up in English and received a C-, so I will have to work much harder to make up for my own shortcomings.”

In short, in the contemporary political situation, ideology is often posed in terms of the war of good against evil. In such a situation, those who would stress the universality of the Koranic message rarely meet with much success. It is too easy to think that the other guy is at fault and we are fine. And in order to think that way, it is necessary to forget that God’s mercy extends to all creatures. If people did remember that God’s mercy takes precedence over his wrath, they might have to start searching for faults in themselves and to leave the others to God. They might have to accept that the C- was a gift and that they should have flunked.

Excerpted from the book “The Vision of Islam” by Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick. Please Click on image below to buy this book.

source: http://www.islamicity.com/articles/Articles.asp?ref=IC1012-4399

Continue reading »]]> It takes a true calling to make faith a way of life. The Calling is a four-hour documentary series that follows seven Muslims, Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Jews on a dramatic journey as they train to become professional clergy. Embarking on life paths that demand tremendous personal sacrifice and commitment, these seminarians must uphold timeless truths in an era that values quick fixes and hot trends, and face a public that challenges the very relevance of their mission. A new look at an old job, The Calling takes viewers into the unknown world of seminaries to tell entertaining and compelling personal stories of how faith is lived in today.

The Calling intercuts its characters’ stories from their first days of training, through years of study, and into their early practice as religious professionals. We follow them within and beyond the walls of their schools, confronting the sacrifices they’ve made to pursue this path. We see them debate theology and philosophy, learn to deliver sermons, perform their first weddings and funerals, and counsel people in crisis. We also experience them as young people at the crossroads of their lives, struggling with dating, partners, family, and other challenges of coming of age.

Watch the full episode. See more Independent Lens.

These young people are charismatic and real, driven and self-reflective, confident and humble. They are seeking to reconcile the modern world and their faith through music and activism; balancing their egos and their desire to serve, and blazing new paths to leadership while conserving age-old traditions.

As this new generation of religious leaders prepares to take its place in our society, our characters’ unfolding stories explore some of the current issues facing America’s religious communities. Islam strives to establish its American identity. The Catholic Church responds to sexual abuse scandals and to the profound demographic shift to a Spanish-speaking majority. African American churches adapt to women taking more active leadership roles.

The United States is one of the most religiously observant and spiritually diverse countries in the world, yet mainstream media has underplayed the significance of faith in our lives, and our pluralism has been addressed almost exclusively in terms of race and culture. Most explorations of faith often focus on single faiths, church scandals, fundamentalist extremists, or religion’s polarizing effect on society. The Calling underscores our spiritual common ground and offers intimate portraits for a nuanced examination of faith in America.

source: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/calling/film.html

Continue reading »]]> By Frankie Martin
December 17 2010

This year has not been an easy one for Jewish-Muslim relations. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is in a state of collapse, apocalyptic pronouncements about Iran’s nuclear program abound, and the plan by a Muslim group to build an Islamic Center near Ground Zero was staunchly opposed by venerable Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League.
Wherever one looks, the gap between Jews and Muslims appears to be growing.
For the past two years, I have been in a unique position in which to observe relations between the two communities. As a part of a research team led by American University’s Chair of Islamic Studies, Professor Akbar Ahmed, I traveled to 100 mosques in 75 American cities for the book Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam, (Brookings Institution Press, 2010). We conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Muslims, in which they often conveyed their opinions of Jews, but also visited many synagogues and institutions like the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, speaking with Jews about their opinions of Muslims.

While we saw real efforts on both sides to reach across the great divide, such as the Jewish vice-mayor of Chicago who named a street after the founder of Pakistan and the many imams conducting interfaith initiatives, the relationship remains fraught. Many Muslims told us they feel Jews are on the warpath against Islam and point to the conflict with the Palestinians, while Jews often feel threatened not only by Muslim states like Iran, but by Islam itself, which was frequently described to us as a religion of terror and barbarism. Many Jews and Muslims admitted to us that they had never met a member of the other faith. This lack of communication is dangerous as it can lead to misunderstanding, mistrust, and hatred.
The only solution to this problem is interaction, an exchange of ideas and an exploration of differing narratives. Earlier this week, Professor Ahmed, who has been involved in Jewish-Muslim dialogue for the past two decades, provided a good example on how this can be done in his address to the Beth El synagogue in Bethesda, Maryland. Although we had been to many synagogues on our journey, this was the first orthodox community we had visited and Ahmed was the first Muslim to address the congregation.
In his lecture, delivered from the pulpit next to huge Torah scrolls to an audience of over 300 worshippers in conservative attire, Ahmed gave a basic “Islam 101″ talk, discussed the remarkable theological similarities between the two faiths, assessed the difficulties facing the communities, and explored ways of moving ahead
Ahmed discussed connections between the communities like Prophet Muhammad’s Jewish wife and the “Medina compact” in which the Prophet declared Jews–who along with Christians are honored as “people of the book”–to be a part of the world community of believers. In this context, it is impossible for Muslims to be anti-Jewish, despite the distortion of Quranic passages by both Muslims and non-Muslims who attempt to argue the contrary. Ahmed quoted his friend and former Princeton colleague Professor Bernard Lewis on the rights Jews were afforded in Muslim societies like the Ottoman Empire, where Jews could live according to their own laws. Many are unaware, for example, that several Ottoman Sultans, speaking their capacity as the Caliph of Islam, issued nineteenth century proclamations condemning anti-Semitic blood libels as fictitious and reiterating their commitment to religious freedom for the Jews. At a time when hate literature like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is widely circulated in the Muslim world and prominent politicians in the U.S. and Europe liken Muslims to Nazis, this history must be remembered.
Ahmed answered many of the common questions Jews have about Islam, including the fiction that Islam commands Muslims to die for 72 virgins (neither the figure of 72 or the word virgin appears in the Quran in this context), the false idea that the US Constitution faces an imminent threat from Muslims seeking to overthrow the government in favor of shariah law, and the demonstrably false notion that Islam is a violent religion.
Ahmed also addressed the most common question of all, “where are the moderates?” Noting that members of his wife’s family were killed by militants in Pakistan and pointing to the sacrifice of others like Benazir Bhutto, Ahmed said that the battle is on for a modern, democratic Islam and that there are millions of Muslims who are in the thick of it. By understanding the tensions in Muslim society and not treating Islam as a dangerous monolith, Jews can help improve the situation of the Muslim world.
This understanding and outreach is also in Israel’s interest, Ahmed contended. The global Muslim population is 1.5 billion, one fourth of the planet’s population, and includes 57 majority Muslim states. The Jewish world population by contrast, is 13 million, seven million of which live in Israel. In the near future there could be several Muslim nations gaining access to nuclear weapons, and when coupled with a surrounding hostile Arab population of 300 million, which demographers estimate may double by the middle of this century, it is clear that “bringing down the temperature” between the communities is essential for Israel’s survival.
The response to Professor Ahmed’s talk was very positive. I could see many heads nodding and there were touching moments, as when Ahmed was discussing the difficulties young American Muslims are having balancing their religion with American culture, and the yarmulke-wearing Jewish man in front of me put his arm around his teenage son. I had many discussions with congregation members afterward, including Rabbi William Rudolph, who welcomed us warmly to his house of worship and thanked Professor Ahmed for his “courage” and asked him to design a course to promote Jewish-Muslim dialogue based in their respective communities. A Jewish couple described Ahmed as a tzadik, which in Orthodox Judaism is a learned and saintly man, similar to the Arabic designation sadiq.
Before me I could see the goal posts shifting. The tone of the larger conversation had changed. It was a historic step in building bridges between the two communities, which Ahmed argued is “a matter of life and death.”
Despite the gloom of the headlines, I glean hope from my experiences at meetings like that at the Beth El Synagogue and through my encounters with Jewish peacemakers like Judea Pearl, who tours with Ahmed promoting interfaith dialogue. It is also encouraging to see that the Anti-Defamation League has formed a new body, and Ahmed is part of it, specifically to support and protect mosques in America.
Not only are better relations between Jews and Muslims imperative for their respective communities, but they are also of utmost importance for the United States as it attempts to win Muslim “hearts and minds.” The Jewish-Muslim dialogue is also keeping with the interfaith vision of America’s Founding Fathers, who welcomed both communities to the United States with open arms. With so many Jews and Muslims living so close to one another in the United States, America is the ideal place for this dialogue to occur. The dialogue here can make an impact in the Middle East and move the Abrahamic faiths closer to mutual harmony and peace.

Frankie Martin is an Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow at American University’s School of International.

source: http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/12/jews_and_muslims_how_do_we_bring_the_temperature_down.html

Continue reading »]]> by Tom Block
November 15, 2010

We read in Sunday’s Washington Post (A20: “Allegations of Racism and questions about a town’s character”), about the continuing desecration of a once fertile Jewish-Muslim mystical fraternity. The article notes: “In the winding stone alleys of this Galilee hill town, a centuries-old center of Jewish mysticism, a campaign is underway. It is being waged by the town rabbi, Shmuel Eliahu, who along with other area rabbis issued a religious ruling several months ago forbidding residents to rent apartments to Israeli Arab students from the local community college. The rabbi has warned that the Jewish character of Safed, long revered as sacred, is at risk and that intermarriages could follow if the students mingle with the locals.”
The funny (or sad) thing is that Safed was once a center of Jewish-Muslim mystical co-mingling, where Jews studied with Islamic mystics to better understand and expand their own Jewish faith. I detail this 16th-17th century “Golden Age” of Safed in my recent book, Shalom/Salaam: A Story of a Mystical Fraternity (https://www.fonsvitae.com/OnlineStore/tabid/58/pid/361/0784-ShalomSalaam-A-Story-of-a-Mystical-Fraternity.aspx). Here is a small taste of what I said, and what represents a lost history that flies in the face of the small-minded racism of the city’s current inhabitants:
“The small town of Safed, in the Upper Galilee in the Holy Land, emerged as the center of Kabbalistic studies about 40 years after the expulsion of the Spanish Jews (1492). Jewish legend held that all the souls of the righteous dead passed through Safed on their way to the Cave of Macpelah, the first door of Paradise on Earth – so perhaps some of the more righteous living figured that they would get a head start. In addition, the little town was close to Meron, the birthplace and tomb of the supposed author of the Zohar, Simeon ben Yohai (c. 2nd century). From the late 15th century onward, Jewish mystics from far and wide gathered in the small hill town. Recent exiles from Spain, wanderers from Poland and Germany, Rabbis from Egypt and other North African countries and even a few stragglers from Yemen filtered into Safed to study and continue to expand the Kabbalah. The convergence of these many strains of Judaism precipitated a revival in the small town, bursting into spiritual flame between 1540-1570.
Not only did the greatest Kabbalistic minds concentrate in the village, but a thriving community of Sufi mystics also was in residence there, providing the Jewish thinkers with a firsthand look at Islamic mysticism. For instance, the important Kabbalistic practice of seclusion (hitbodedut) mirrored similar activity by the Rifai Sufis who used seclusion cells, or zawiyyas, on the mountainside across from the town to practice khalwa. Undoubtedly, this provided the Jewish mystics with an immediate view of the practice.
Although not as widespread as it had been earlier in Spain, Egypt and the Holy Land, congenial relations between followers of the two religious paths certainly were not unheard of. Rabbi Hayyim Vital (d. 1620; Damascus), an important source of Kabbalistic lore for the Baal Shem Tov (d. 1760, founder of Hasidism), related that his theological discussions with Islamic dignitaries prompted him to study the Arabic tongue, so that he could better appreciate the nuances of their ideas.
The Middle Eastern Sufi as-Sha’rani (d. 1565), operating a few decades prior to Vital, noted that not only did Jews come and study with him, but also that many found so much worth in his Islamic mystical teachings that they often embraced Islam. His claim can hardly be dismissed, as half-a-century later, Rabbi Abraham Gavison of Tlemcen (c. 1605; Algeria) concluded his Hebrew translation of the Sufi al-Ghazali’s mystical poetry with these words: “I have translated the poetry of this sage, for even though he be not of the Children of Israel, it is accepted that the pious of the gentiles have a share in the world to come and surely heaven will not withhold from him the reward of his faith.” As late as the 18th century, Kabbalists still had regular contact with the Sufis, such as the Moroccan Rabbi Halifa ibn Malka (c. 1750).”
It is truly sad how this long and often positive relationship has been subsumed in the political hatreds of the current day. If only today’s rabbis and inhabitants of Safed would look a bit more closely at their own history, they would find a time when the surrounding Muslim community welcomed Jewish exiles, and shared with them mystical insight.

http://tomblock.blogspot.com/

Continue reading »]]> By Hugh Sykes
11 December 2010

At a demonstration I went to last week against evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem there were more Jews chanting and holding up banners in support of the Palestinians than there were Arabs.

The banners were in Hebrew and in English. That is a change.

I remember going to an anti-occupation demonstration by a variety of peace activists in Tel Aviv a few years ago.

They had slogans entirely in Hebrew, which meant I had to clumsily ask a number of people what their posters meant.

I wondered why some of them were not in a more international language, like English.

“Ah,” said one of the demonstrators, “I suppose you have a point.”

Then I asked her, “Who do you think you are actually talking to at demos like these?”

After a long pause she said, “That’s a very good question. I think we are just talking to ourselves.”

That has changed too.

Playing together

There is much more contact now between Jews and Arabs who feel the same way about the occupation, and a lot of it is under the radar, so to speak – barely reported.

“We are successful,” said Raida, a Palestinian teacher. “And that’s why the government don’t like us”.

Raida teaches English and History to a class of 11-year-olds. She looked round the room at the children gathered at small tables.

“Two Jews at that table, one Arab,” she told me. “Three Arabs, two Jews over there. And in the corner, two Jews and two Arabs.”

The school is in Wahdat al Salaam/Neve Shalom (Oasis of Peace), a village where Arabs and Jews have lived together willingly as neighbours since it was established in 1970.

“But the children are spontaneously genuinely mixing, are they?” I asked.

“Yes, absolutely,” Raida insisted. “They play together, they visit each other’s homes, they go to the cinema together. They are friends.”

The day I visited, the children were making kites in honour of their special guest, the British author of numerous books for young people, Michael Morpurgo.

He has just written a children’s book about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mutual respect

It is a heartening story of a Palestinian boy who lets kites fly free over the concrete wall round an Israeli settlement, with “salaam” written on them.

When the wind changes, the kites come flying back with “shalom” written on them by the settlement children.

Michael Morpurgo believes peace can only come from young Jews and young Arabs living together, learning together and showing respect to each other.

“It’s not going to start from the other end,” he told me, “we’ve seen that.” He means it will never come from the top.

But does the children’s experience at Neve Shalom/Wahdat al Salaam endure?

Raida the teacher said yes, absolutely it does – it is rooted in them, after 11 years in an enlightened community like this.

She tells a revealing story about one of her Jewish students going on to secondary school and daring to challenge the teacher who was telling the class there was nobody living in what is now Israel when the state was created in 1948.

“If a Jewish child can stand up to an inaccurate teacher like that in a Jewish school,” Raida smiled, “there is some hope.”

Arab and Israeli ‘brothers’

Rami and Mazen believe in hope as well.

They also visit schools, in Israel and in the occupied territories.

Their message is that violence will never solve the conflict.

They are very persuasive.

Rami is a Jew, Mazen a Palestinian Arab and they know what violence is.

Mazen’s 62-year-old father was shot dead by an Israeli soldier.

Rami’s 14-year-old daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber on a bus in Jerusalem.

Rami and Mazen are now close friends – they call each other brother.

They are members of the Parents Circle and Families Forum.

It is not a psychological support group. It is a campaigning organisation with a very precise objective which is written on their smart business cards: “Bereaved families supporting peace, reconciliation and tolerance”.

Negotiation

“Initiatives like these are essential ‘baby steps’,” Hind Kabawat told me.

Hind is a Syrian lawyer who specialises in conflict resolution.

In her fabulous, spacious, stone Damascus house – with a fountain in the courtyard and elaborately painted high ceilings – she proudly pointed to “the most important books on my shelf: the Bible, the Koran and the Sayings of Mahatma Gandhi”.

Does she believe Israel and the Palestinians are reconcilable?

Does she believe – especially now, with talk of attacks on nuclear sites – that Israel and Iran can negotiate?

“Of course,” she said. “In Ireland, peace only came after the British negotiated with the IRA.”

Then she added: “Look at Europe. Millions of people died there in the Second World War. Millions! Did your parents or mine ever believe there would be peace in Europe?” she asked.

“Well there is,” she went on, “because they did believe in it. We have to have hope.”

source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9273866.stm

Continue reading »]]> by Chris Stedman
December 5, 2010

“‘Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart.” So said Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass, in a 2007 interview with The Atlantic. He might be right, but I can’t help but wonder: What if we could reach both the head and the heart?

It’s a question I asked myself many times over while writing my Master of Arts in Religion thesis on narrative and religion last year. Now, as the Managing Director of State of Formation, a new online forum for emerging religious and ethical leaders founded by the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue and run in partnership with Hebrew College, Andover Newton Theological School and collaboration with Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, I am so excited about the content that has flooded the site in its inaugural week — and how our religious and philosophical academics are using both their minds and their hearts to enter into dialogue.

Our initial group of nearly 70 contributing scholars contains Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Protestant (among them Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and others), Hindu, Secular Humanist, Sikh, Agnostic, Greek Orthodox, Unitarian Universalist, Mormon, Evangelical Christian, Atheist and Lindisfarne participants. Some were born in the Bible belt; others grew up in places like Jamaica, Singapore, Japan, and Germany. They are gay and straight, liberal and conservative, religious and secular.

There is also a wide range of experience among them. Some have been engaged in interfaith dialogue and social action for years — others are brand new to it. There are Ph.D. students, people in Master of Arts in Religion, Master of Divinity, and Master of Education programs, some fresh out of graduate school, community organizers and activists, and even a recent Master of Fine Arts graduate and current professor of creative writing who is at work on a memoir about growing up as an Evangelical Christian. Many live in various parts of the United States of America, and there are several in England, Israel, Australia and other parts of the world.

It’s an eclectic cohort, to be sure, and already their dialogue is rife with questions, disagreements and attempts at answers. The singular consensus among these religiously varied emerging leaders? This dialogue matters.

Jason A. Kerr, a doctoral candidate in English at Boston College and a lifelong Mormon, has high hopes for this project. “I’m hoping that State of Formation will enable its contributors and readers to forge a new community, one that can amplify the capacities for good now present in those communities to which we already belong,” wrote Kerr in his first post. “We’re undertaking a very difficult sort of dialogue here, but also a very necessary one.”

Kari Aanestad, a Master of Divinity student spending a year in Oxford, England, where her husband is a Rhodes Scholar studying the history of science, agrees. “Interfaith work … is absolutely crucial, and as a Lutheran I could not be more committed to this dialogue. One of the primary tenets of my faith is that I am free to love and serve my neighbors, which challenges me to go beyond my local culture and hear the stories of those outside, to meet new people (yes, even non-Lutherans!) and learn from them,” Aanestad wrote in her first post, a reflection on what she is discovering about interfaith dialogue by living in a context dramatically different from the Midwest, where her Lutheran heritage was commonplace. “While I have ultimately learned that my spiritual identity is not synonymous with Minnesota culture, perhaps there’s room for a new potluck where everyone’s dish is welcome.”

Every contributor comes from a particular religious or philosophical background, but this difficult and enriching dialogue also enables each to be an individual, not just a representative of her or his tradition. “While I hold no illusions that my contributions to this space represent the Islamic perspective on any particular issue,” wrote Garfield Swaby, a student working towards a Masters in Islamic Studies and Muslim-Christian Relations at Hartford Seminary, “I hope only to blog new reflections into existence informed by my understanding of Islam, or by any of my other commitments, for that matter.”

By engaging with one another’s commitments, they are already getting to know one another and making their dialogue more about mutual understanding than about academic knowing. “As young scholars, practitioners, and activists, our intellectual lives, our spiritual lives, or our careers might be in states of formation, but the public conversations about religion and ethics in the United States are also in a state of formation,” wrote Joshua Eaton, a Buddhist and recent Master of Divinity graduate from Harvard University. “My hope is that State of Formation can help put some meat on the bones of that conversation by giving voice not just to the what of religion, but also to the who, when, where, why, and how. Religion could not be more important to our public life; we cannot afford to be uninformed.”

This is a new and exciting endeavor for all involved, but perhaps maybe for none more than Brandon Turner. In his first post, Turner explored why an online forum may be an ideal platform for this challenging and transformative dialogue.

“Why did an individual who has never blogged, tweeted, or facebooked (is this the term?) decide to apply to a new interreligious initiative that will exist almost exclusively in the online world?” asked Turner. “I believe that … those who are a part of this ever growing community are truly embarking on something unique. As we get to know each other over the next few months, I believe we will be, in many ways, defining what ‘interreligious dialogue 2.0′ will look like in the future.”

To see the future religious and philosophical leaders of tomorrow begin to redefine the discourse on religion and ethics together today, please take a look at the website. We invite you to weigh in; as our diverse group of Contributing Scholars can attest, this is a conversation that not only needs everyone — it needs everyone’s heart and mind.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-stedman/future-religious-and-ethi_b_788464.html

Continue reading »]]> by Rabbi Sid Schwarz
December 4, 2010

On the first night of Hanukkah this year, I found myself in an unusual place. I was supposed to be at a Jewish communal event hosted by Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren. But at the last minute I was asked by the Indonesian Ambassador, Dino Patti Djalal, to participate in an interfaith panel which included one of the leading Muslim clerics of his country, Dr. Din Syamsuddin. Dr. Syamsuddin is the president of Muhammadiyah, an organization of 29 million Muslims that sponsors a wide range of social and educational programs in Indonesia and more than a dozen universities. Also on the panel was Rev. Michael Livingston, a Presbyterian and former president of the National Council of Churches who is now heading up their initiative to fight poverty.

The fact is that I only accepted the invitation because of a remarkable speech I heard given by Ambassador Djalal a week earlier as part of an international conference sponsored by the Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty (CIFA). The organization was unveiling a new initiative to increase the engagement of faith communities in health and development efforts around the globe.

The Ambassador, who hosted a dinner for the delegates, shared his concerns about the extent to which the world was witnessing an increase in religious extremism. A Muslim himself, Djalal bemoaned the fact that in his own country religious communities that had lived side by side in harmony for centuries were set against each other because of the actions of a handful of religious zealots. He called upon the faith leaders gathered to engage in “militant moderation,” by which he meant that those of us who believe that religions can bring healing balm to a world beset by war, disease and poverty must be far more assertive than the voices of religious extremism. He called for a new “technology of peace” which would be based not on rehashing the prejudices and grievances of past generations but rather on the more positive model of interfaith collaboration to address the most pressing issues of the world.

So committed was Ambassador Djalal to advancing this kind of interfaith understanding that he arranged to bring a TV crew in from Indonesia in a matter of days to tape the conversation between Dr. Syamsuddin, Rev. Livingston and me. The program will air in prime time on one of Indonesia’s most popular programs the week before Christmas. He wanted to model for his country the ways that religious leaders from different faiths could sit together and find common ground.

For those acquainted with interfaith dialogue, the conversation covered familiar territory. We discussed how people could be loyal to their respective faiths but still be open to and respectful of those who were adherents of another faith. And while this particular dialogue took place only between representatives of the Abrahamic traditions, the nature of the conversation sent a message to the broader community of the faithful. No responsible representation of God’s will, from any faith perspective, could possibly sanction hatred or violence against another child of God.

Hanukkah is called “the festival of lights.” It marks the victory of the Jews against their Hellenized Syrian oppressors in the land of Israel during the second century BCE. The Jews had none of the weaponry of their occupiers. Yet the Maccabees would not succumb to the demands of the Syrians to give up their religious beliefs and practices. The fact that the Maccabees ultimately prevailed is recorded as the first war in history fought for religious liberty. Appropriately enough, the annual Jewish cycle of Scriptural readings assigns to the festival of Hanukkah a selection from the Book of Zecharia (4:6): “Not by might and not by power but by spirit, says the Lord of heaven.”

Two thousand years later, we are still fighting the same battles. In a world that is changing so rapidly, religion provides comfort, continuity and timeless certainty to millions of the faithful in the world. But often that religious package also includes heavy doses of triumphalism, chauvinism and intolerance. It is incumbent on religious leaders to help their adherents distinguish between the elements of faith that foster peace and understanding and those that lead to prejudice and extremism.

As with Christmas and Kwanza, Hanukkah falls during the winter solstice. It is the darkest time of the year. Appropriately enough, all three festivals have as a central symbol candles and light. If we are to move our world closer to the messianic ideal articulated in the sacred texts of most of the world’s religions, each of us will need to find ways to light a candle, increase the light and banish away the darkness.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-sid-schwarz/hanukkah-increasing-the-l_b_791548.html

Continue reading »]]> By David Weinberg

08 December 2010

An untold story of the Nazi Holocaust is on display at a Jewish temple in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s a photography exhibit, featuring portraits of elderly Albanian Muslims – men and women who helped save nearly 2,000 Jews who fled to Albania during World War II.

Untold story

“Who ever heard of Muslims saving Jews?,” asks photographer Norman Gershman. After hearing the story, he decided to visit Albania to meet the surviving families who had sheltered Jews. “I wanted to go to Albania first to discover for myself who are these people.”

For the past six years, Gershman, a fine art photographer whose work is typically displayed in museums, traveled throughout Albania and Kosovo. He photographed most of his subjects in their homes, often with objects that were significant to the people they sheltered.

In one photograph, a man stands with three Jewish prayer books that a family left behind after the war.

“I’ll never forget this – when we were at this guy’s home and he was looking at us sort of like angrily and he said ‘What are you doing here?’” says Gershman. “We said, ‘Well, your family saved this Jewish family,’ and he looked at us and said, ‘So what? Any Albanian would have done the same thing. We did nothing special,’ and he meant it.”

Word of honor

The Albanians have a word for this: Besa. It translates as ‘word of honor,’ and is a cultural precept unique to Albania.

“The word Besa in Albanian is kind of protection of when they host a guest, the Albanians, it’s a rule, they protect them with their own lives,” says Alberto Colonomos, a Jewish man born in 1933 in what was then Yugoslavia. He was 10 years old when his family fled to Albania.

“There were about 7,200 Jews living in that area. They deported them to the concentration camps and they deported them all the way to Treblinka. They killed them all, nobody came back. But about 50 families escaped a week or two weeks before the deportation.”
A wealthy man who worked in a tobacco factory took in the Colonomos family. Unlike many Jews in other parts of Europe who survived the war in cellars and attics, Jews in Albania were given Muslim names and treated as honored guests. Colonomos explains that under Besa, Albanians put their guests before their own family.

“They really hid us with their lives. They knew that the Germans – the consequences if they catch them were very, very stiff. So they would be shot. But when they have that Besa, they will not denounce their guests. They were amazing people.”

Gershman’s black and white portraits have been in over 70 exhibitions around the world. For the rest of the year they are on display – for the first time in the American Midwest – at Temple Emanuel, a Reform Jewish synagogue in St. Louis, Missouri.

Interfaith dialogue

“We are really delighted to have it and were really excited to see the interest,” said Rabbi Justin Kerber, who has led the congregation for a year and a half. He hopes the exhibit will help start an interfaith dialogue in his own community that will spread to other parts of the country.

“At this time when there is so much tension in the world and so much attention being paid to Jewish-Muslim conflict or Israeli-Arab conflict, it’s really important for everyone to understand that is not the only story,” says Kerber. “It’s not the way things have always been and I’m really looking forward to growing this relationship with the Islamic Foundation.”

That hope is shared by Mufti Minhajuddin Ahmed, the Imam and director of Religious Services of the Greater Islamic Foundation of St. Louis, which partnered with Temple Emanuel for a panel discussion on the exhibit’s opening night.

“I think at a time when the Jewish-Muslim relations are very sour to many of the events taking place in the Middle East, this was a very timely and much-needed exhibition that highlights how Muslims have saved Jews and these are the true teachings of Islam,” says Ahmed. “This is an opportunity for others to learn that it’s a religion that is not born in violence. Rather they are teachings of compassion and kindness.”

The compassion and kindness – the Besa – of the Albanian Muslims was recognized by Israel in 2007. The Jewish state awarded them one of its highest honors, Righteous Among Nations, which is granted to non-Jews who saved the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.

Gershman’s photographs of those men and women have been published in a book called “Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews During World War II.” A documentary film based on Gershman’s trip to Albania will be released next year.

SOURCE: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/arts/Muslims-Save-Jews-in-Untold-WWll-Story-111517964.html

Continue reading »]]> by P.K. ABDUL GHAFOUR | ARAB NEWS

JEDDAH: The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) has emphasized the importance of cultural and interfaith dialogue to promote world peace and stability, and said it was seeking a historic reconciliation between the Muslim world and the West.

“The OIC reflects the true and real image of Islam, based on tolerance, peace, pluralism and acknowledgement of diversity. It advocates dialogue with other faiths and civilizations,” said Abdul Rauf Bin Rajab, spokesman for the 57-member organization. He said Islamophobia has evoked global concern because of its negative impact on world peace and security. He also disclosed the OIC’s plan to hold a seminar in Warsaw on Dec. 8-10 to discuss the situation of Muslim communities in Central and Eastern Europe.

Bin Rajab refuted press comments attributed to the OIC secretary-general in Fars News Agency that the West has hatched plots to spread Islamophobia in a bid to block growing conversions to Islam. “The agency’s report is inaccurate and misleading.”

He said the issue required joint international efforts. The increasing manifestations of Islamophobia in the West shows inadequate knowledge about nations and cultures, he said, while emphasizing the need for forging a new relationship and understanding through respect for cultural diversity.

The OIC spokesman commended Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah’s interfaith initiative. “We, in the OIC, are determined to work hard and continue to maintain our strong belief that diverse cultures should complement one another. Tolerance, stability and prosperity are nurtured only when nations and cultures communicate and respect each other.”

Bin Rajab also called for action to prevent hatred against other religions. “We do not negate existence of hatred against other religions and we extend our hand of cooperation to counter anti-Semitism, Christianophobia and misperceptions about Western culture.” He said the OIC Charter and its Ten-Year Program of Action were based on a vision of moderation and modernization.

Speaking about the role of Muslims living in Western countries to counter the apprehensions of local populations, the OIC official said Muslims in the West should play a critical role in removing misperceptions and portraying the true image of Islam.

Muslims should voice their perspectives through peaceful and political channels available at the local, national and regional levels in the West. “It is important to exercise restraint and act responsibly in the wake of motivated provocations like the blasphemous cartoons or the hoax pertaining to burning the Qur’an.”

Bin Rajab said the OIC has been actively engaged in optimally utilizing all the political and diplomatic means at its disposal to warn against the adverse impact of actions that hamper peaceful coexistence of religions and cultures. In this context, OIC is intending to hold a seminar in Warsaw on Dec. 8-10 to discuss the situation of Muslim communities in Central and Eastern Europe. The symposium will explore the situation of Muslim minorities in those geographical areas, and monitor the problems they face in order to find solutions for them, he said.

source: http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article208905.ece

Continue reading »]]> LONDON – In a speech to an event in London Tuesday, New York Rabbi Marc Schneier – a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and a pioneer in fostering closer Jewish-Muslim relations in North America and Europe – praised leaders of the Al-Azhar Al-Sharif University in Cairo, the oldest center of Islamic scholarship in the world, for opening up inter-religious dialogue to the Jews.

The ‘Banu Ibrahim – Children of Abraham Declaration’ was officially delivered at a gathering of senior faith and political leaders hosted by the charity Children of Abraham and the Al-Azhar Institute for Dialogue with the Monotheistic Religions at the House of Lords on Tuesday.

Rabbi Schneier declared: “This is a landmark decision, and Al-Azhar deserves praise for it. Coming from the leading centre of Islamic thinking in the world, it will be enormously helpful for all moderate forces within Islam. This declaration rightly emphasizes the importance of inter-faith relations. Leaders from both sides should now seize the opportunity and take Jewish-Muslim relations to the next level. Both communities have a lot more in common, and to give to the other side, than many people think.”

With the support of the World Jewish Congress and the Islamic Society of America, Rabbi Schneier’s Foundation for Ethnic Understanding (www.ffeu.org) has spearheaded the annual twinning of mosques and synagogues in North America and Europe.

Al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt was founded in 970 and is the leading centre of Sunni Islamic learning in the world. In June 2009, US President Barack Obama gave a widely-noted speech on relations between America and Islam there.

The ‘Banu Ibrahim – Children of Abraham Declaration’ was drafted by Sheikh Fawzi Al-Zifzaf, head of Al-Azhar’s Permanent Committee for Dialogue with the Monotheistic Religions. It emphasizes that Islam is calling for “brotherhood and mutual understanding and the strengthening of bonds between Muslims and followers of the other religions, and the establishment of bridges of dialogue with scholarly institutions in Europe and America.”

The text also calls for dialogue to “be founded upon equality, mutual respect and valuing of the opinions of one another.”

While Al-Azhar’s bilateral dialogue with the Vatican has been in place since the 1990s, its scholars have not officially engaged in talks with Jews until now.

The World Jewish Congress is the international organization representing Jewish communities in 92 countries around the world.

source: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=42714

Continue reading »]]> By SCOTT JAMES
Published: October 21, 2010
Looking resplendent in red vestments, the Rev. John Jimenez conducted mass on Monday before about 20 congregants and reminded them the date was the Feast of St. Luke. “Luke is the patron saint of doctors,” he said, “so it has some special meaning here in the hospital.”
Father Jimenez conducts midday mass Sunday through Friday here at the small chapel inside San Francisco General hospital, a city-financed facility. These days the Roman Catholic service is no-frills: the altar is a metal cart draped in scarlet cloth and wheeled in just before the service. The faithful sit on worn folding chairs and kneel on carpet remnants to pray.

Until recently there was a large altar and pews that ran nearly the width of the room. Years earlier, a crucifix hung on the wall. Visually, at least, the chapel was a Roman Catholic place of worship.

Not anymore.

In a sign of changing times, the 1960s-era chapel is getting a decidedly modern face-lift. Work that is scheduled to be completed by December will transform the space to welcome all faiths, including Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Wiccans, Pagans — and even those who do not believe in any god at all.

“This is a public space,” said the Rev. Elizabeth Welch, an Episcopal priest serving at the hospital’s Sojourn Chaplaincy, which offers spiritual counseling. “Not everyone is Christian.”

The chapel is an interior room with no windows, but new flooring indicates the directions of the compass — essential for Muslims who must face east toward Mecca to pray, and vital to other beliefs, including Native American faiths and Wiccans. Moveable, nondenominational furnishings made from reclaimed teak are being added, allowing the chapel to be configured for a variety of ceremonies.

The renovations reflect how religious demographics have shifted. In the 1950s, half of the city’s population was Roman Catholic. When the hospital surveyed its patients in 2009 and asked about religious affiliation, the largest response (8,006 of nearly 18,000) was “no reported preference.”

Some people might have declined to answer because of privacy concerns, but there seems little doubt that a sizable percentage of patients today do not belong to organized faiths. Of those who said they did, 4,632 patients identified as Roman Catholic, followed by 3,568 who said they belonged to Christian Protestant and Orthodox denominations, 295 Buddhists, 261 Muslims, 123 Jews, and 926 who said “other.”

Tolerance for different religious traditions could have been divisive in redesigning the chapel — consider the contentious debate over a planned Islamic cultural center in Manhattan. Critics have called it the “ground zero mosque,” but others have pointed out is neither a mosque nor actually at ground zero. Instead, the evolution of San Francisco General’s worship space brought together leaders of nearly every faith.

The Rev. Will Hocker, an Episcopal priest and executive director of the Sojourn Chaplaincy, helped lead the redesign effort and about a year ago gathered more than a dozen local religious leaders to rethink the space. “We had been feeling for a number of years that it should not be an exclusive worship place in a public hospital,” Father Hocker said.

Traci Teraoka, a designer and interim executive director of Maitri, a hospice that embraces all beliefs, attended the discussion and said the different faiths discovered their commonalities, like a devotion to nature, which will be incorporated into the final design. “It was powerful,” Ms. Teraoka said of the gathering.

for the full text: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/us/22bcjames.html?ref=religion_and_belief