Muslim Heretics Conference

Efforts at Jewish-Muslim Understanding Grow Despite Attempts to Demonize Islam

By Allan C. Brownfeld

DESPITE THE efforts of some Israelis and some in the American Jewish community to demonize the religion of Islam rather than focusing their attention on the minority of extremists within the Islamic community, efforts toward Muslim-Jewish understanding are growing.

Recalls Rabbi Bruce M. Lustig, senior rabbi at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, one of the largest Jewish congregations in North America with more than 3,000 families served: “Shortly after 9/11, I invited Bishop John Chane (Episcopal bishop of Greater Washington and the National Cathedral) and professor Akbar Ahmed (Ibn Khaldun scholar of Islamic studies at American University) to share with them the idea of starting an Abrahamic faith dialogue. My simple premise was based on what my mother told me as a child: Stay away from strangers. If these two men and their faiths were to remain strangers to me, I would only grow to fear them, not know them. Soon after, we held one of the first Abrahamic faith forums in America. We also forged a friendship that has been transformative. These men are my friends, my mentors, my sounding boards.”

Although “we do not agree on every social or political question,” Rabbi Lustig notes, “we have deep respect for, and a deep honesty with, each other. Having others challenge my ideas and demand clarity of creed is a powerful and uplifting experience. They have helped me to become a stronger Jew and a better rabbi. To my children, the answer to what it means to be Christian or Muslim is not abstract; it is the love they know from John and Akbar, who join us at our table and who teach us by example.”

This past November, more than 50 mosques and synagogues across the country participated in the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding’s Weekend of Twinning.

With a stated premise that “we are all children of Abraham,” the weekend brought together synagogues and mosques to combat Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in their communities.

“What we realized is that we don’t know enough about each other,” said Rabbi Gregory Harris of Congregation Beth-El in Bethesda, Maryland. “We’re relatives in the Abrahamic sense, but we’re total strangers in every other sense of it.”

Beth-El paired with the Islamic Center of Maryland in Gaithersburg to hold “Judaism 101 and Islam 101” classes on the fundamentals of each religion.

The phrase Judeo-Christian should be replaced with “Abrahamic.”

According to Rabbi Marc Schneier, founder and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, who helped establish the weekend, the goal is to “create a paradigm of Jewish-Muslim support that we can export to other parts of the world…We must take advantage of these opportunities, especially within the Muslim world, where we are now beginning to see the emergence of a more moderate centrist voice that has a particular interest in reaching out to the Jewish religion.”

Rabbi Schneier met in New York in November with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, a core supporter of the initiative.

The weekend fulfilled a pledge faith leaders took in 2007 at the World Conference of Dialogue in Madrid. Co-sponsors are the World Jewish Congress, the Muslim Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America.

Daniel Spiro, author of the novel Moses The Heretic (Aegis Press), argues that the phrase Judeo-Christian should be replaced with “Abrahamic.” He notes that although the world faces a real problem of Islamic terrorism, the religion also contains elements that are “uniquely beautiful,” and that “We Jews need to seek them out. Most of us viscerally appreciate Christian ethics as a useful add-on to the foundation of Jewish ethics. But when we think about Islam, most of us don’t appreciate what is profoundly beautiful. We basically see Islam as a violent outgrowth of monotheism. I want that changed.”

In Spiro’s view, “To borrow from another religion, if we want peace in Israel we need to generate good karma. If we embrace what is beautiful in Islam and Muslims begin to embrace what is beautiful in Judaism, we can begin to produce a situation that might lead to peace.”

Bahrain’s Jewish Ambassador

Consider the case of Houda Ezra Nonoo, who in July presented her credentials to President George W. Bush as Bahrain’s ambassador to the U.S., making her the first Jew to represent an Arab country in Washington, DC.

In her first interview, with the Dec. 4, 2008 issue of Washington Jewish Week, Ambassador Nonoo explained: “Bahrain is an open and tolerant society and it doesn’t matter what religion you are. I’m Jewish, but I’m also Bahraini. My grandfather served on the Municipality Council as early as 1934, so we’ve always been integrated into society.”

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, as many as 1,500 Jews lived and prospered in Bahrain. “Things changed in 1948,” according to Washington Jewish Week, “with the establishment of the state of Israel. Riots erupted, the sole synagogue was closed and most of Bahrain’s Jews emigrated, leaving for Great Britain…Currently, about 35 Jews live among Bahrain’s 700,000 inhabitants. This is a constant source of pride for Bahraini officials…In November, King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa, during a meeting in New York, beseeched about 50 Bahraini Jewish expatriates to consider returning home—a move relatively unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.”

“This was something I never expected in my life,” Nonoo said, “to be ambassador in the United States. I think I’ve made a big impact on a lot of people, being female and representing Bahrain in the most important country in the world.” Her reception by fellow Arab diplomats in Washington has been incredibly warm, she reported: “The Syrian ambassador recently hosted a dinner to honor me. The Iraqi ambassador had one…and Oman is having one. They’ve really made me feel at home.”

On Yom Kippur, Nonoo attended Orthodox services. She may not, however, have any relationship with the Embassy of Israel, because Bahrain and Israel do not have diplomatic relations. “Understand that Israel and Judaism are two different things,” she stated. “I’ve never felt any discrimination or anti-Semitism. My father was a very well-known figure. When he died in 1993 in a car accident, the amount of people who came to offer condolences—including the emir, the prime minister and the emir’s other brother—was amazing. They all showed us respect.”

The idea that there has been an ancient enmity between Jews and Muslims is completely ahistorical, and those Jewish groups and individuals who promote such a view seem to be unaware of the long history of cooperation between the two religions. Much has been written In recent years about the Golden Age of Jews in Muslim Spain. Indeed, when Muslim rule came to an end and the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, they were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire. The anti-Semitism which plagued medieval Christian Europe was not to be found in the Islamic world.

In his recent book, Among The Righteous (Public Affairs Press), Robert Satloff, who has served since 1993 as executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, unearths the lost stories of Arabs who saved Jews during the Holocaust. When the Nazis occupied the countries of North Africa and sought to round up Jews and expropriate Jewish property, Satloff notes, “in every place that it occurred, Arabs helped Jews. Some Arabs spoke out against the persecution of Jews and took public stands of unity with them. Some Arabs denied the support and assistance that would have made the wheels of the anti-Jewish campaign spin more efficiently…And there were occasions when certain Arabs chose to do more than just offer moral support to Jews. They bravely saved Jewish lives, at times risking their own in the process. Those Arabs were true heroes.”

Nor was it only in North Africa that Muslims saved Jews. During the Nazi occupation, the Grand Mosque of Paris provided sanctuary for Jews hiding from German and Vichy troops, and provided certificates of Muslim identity to untold numbers of Jews. Satloff quotes reports describing the mosque “as a virtual Grand Central Station for the Underground Railroad of Jews in France.” This story is told in a 1991 film “Une Résistance Oubliée: La Mosque de Paris” (“A Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris”) by Derri Berkani, a French documentary filmmaker of Algerian Berber origin.

The time has come to understand the real history of Jewish-Muslim relations—and those who are leading efforts to achieve mutual understanding between the two faiths are showing the way in this effort. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is political and should not be confused with religion. Perhaps the day will come when Israel helps makes that eminently clear by appointing as ambassador to the U.S. one of its own Muslim citizens.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Efforts at Jewish-Muslim Understanding Grow Despite Attempts to Demonize Islam

By DAVID OLSON
The Press-Enterprise

Maura O’Neill taught classes on religion at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, was adviser to the Muslim student group there, and had served as Catholic campus minister at Cal State San Bernardino.

Yet despite her broad exposure to different religions, even O’Neill harbored stereotypes, especially toward religious conservatives.

“I thought that (religious) conservatives were narrow-minded and insecure,” O’Neill, a self-described progressive Catholic, said after a lecture she gave Tuesday night.

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O’Neill no longer makes such assumptions.

Since then, O’Neill has talked to Orthodox Jewish women who define themselves as feminist, and to veil-wearing Muslim women who believe that feminist American women, not Muslim women, are oppressed.

Those conversations helped form her 2007 book, “Mending a Torn World: Women in Interreligious Dialogue,” which also was the title of the 22nd annual Morrow-McCombs Memorial Lecture that O’Neill delivered Tuesday night at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints near Cal State San Bernardino.

The setting for the address was fitting: A religious progressive speaking inside the chapel of a conservative denomination.

C.E. Tapie Rohm Jr., a former bishop at the Mormon congregation, said after the lecture that the only way to avoid religious polarization is by taking O’Neill’s approach.

“Her whole concept is dialogue: You can’t get to know individuals without talking to them,” Rohm said. “You have to understand the other’s viewpoint . . . and learn about other cultures and traditions.”

Rohm is a member of the interfaith advisory board that put together the lecture, which promotes understanding among Jews, Christians and Muslims.

O’Neill said religious progressives are most likely to come together for interreligious dialogue, but when they do, it’s typically to meet with fellow progressives from other faiths, not with conservatives.

“Lots of times progressives would say to me, ‘You’re going to get a conservative to dialogue?’” O’Neill said. “That’s a stereotype. And how many times have people said to me, ‘You just pick and choose what you want to obey.’ And that’s a stereotype.”

O’Neill said she became a feminist while living in a convent.

She was a nun for 15 years and was impressed by fellow sisters’ intelligence, educational levels and their lack of dependence on males.

Ina Katz, of San Bernardino, a member of Temple Emanu El, a Reform Jewish synagogue, said the lecture helped challenge her view that nuns and Muslim women who wear veils are by definition ritualistic and conservative.

“You shouldn’t just make a snap judgment about it,” Katz said.

Lecturer challenges religious stereotypes | Inland News | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California

How is it that one religion – Islam – seems capable of undermining women and promoting them at the same time?
Anyone attempting to take stock of the position of women in the Muslim world cannot help but be confused. One finds stories in the media all the time about injustices committed against Muslim women, such as “honour” killings, child marriages and discriminatory legal judgments in matters of divorce, custody and inheritance.
On the other hand, one also comes across stories about the remarkable strides made by Muslim women in education, career development and political activism in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Morocco and Turkey.
How can we make sense of such a dichotomous picture?
The answer is simple: by distinguishing the religion of Islam from the Muslims who practice it.
Those who study the Qur’an know that Islam elevated the rights of women beyond anything known in the pre-Islamic world. In fact, in the seventh century Muslim women were granted rights not granted to European women until the 19th century, such as property ownership, inheritance and divorce.
That said, Muslims who codified the Qur’an and Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) into Islamic law did not succeed in expunging the patriarchy of the pre-Islamic world from their practices.
This distinction between the faith and the various manifestations of its practice is a subtle but extremely important one.
When a Westerner is trained to pick up on the distinction, he/she comes to recognise that the Muslim woman who criticises Muslim practices is not usually rebuking her heritage in favour of Western ideals – the kind of rebuke that hits best-seller lists in the West and that feeds Western stereotypes about the religion – but is instead encouraging other Muslims claiming allegiance to Qur’anic teachings to live up to its highest principles.
This inward criticism and call to action is often called Islamic feminism, a promising paradigm which supports change from within, and not in imported formulas.
While adopting the Qur’an at its core, Islamic feminism challenges two main norms: the patriarchal cultural customs mistaken for Islamic teaching and patriarchal interpretations of certain Qur’anic verses.
The project of disentangling what is true Islamic teaching from cultural traditions historically practiced in a Muslim territory is an ongoing project for Muslim feminists.
Arifa Mazhar, the manager of gender issues for the Pakistan-based Sungi Development Foundation, whose goal is to effect policy and institutional changes relating to development by mobilising marginalised local communities, declared at the International Congress on Islamic Feminism in Barcelona in 2008: “Instead of debating Islam, we should be debating culture and its impact…. There are a lot of social taboos and tribal traditions that oppress women, and they have little to do with Islam.”
Islamic feminism’s second challenge is to attempt to reinterpret verses in the Qur’an – especially given the present context – that have been misinterpreted or over-generalised.
One example is the disproportionate weight given to the few Qur’anic verses giving men authority over women within family structures versus the many others that emphasise equality between men and women. Islamic feminism encourages women to study the words of the Qur’an for themselves, and to judge whether the misogyny and failure to take women seriously prevalent in some customs is a matter of Islamic doctrine or, indeed, of cultural impositions on such doctrine. Islamic feminism thus provides the grounds for changing civil and national law in ways that prove progressive for women.
Sisters in Islam, a leading Muslim women’s rights group in Malaysia, has been trying to reform the issue of polygamy. Rather than calling for the abolition of polygamy, for example, it calls only for its restriction to certain situations – such as obtaining permission from the first wife and from the court – and is working on public surveys that would provide empirical evidence of the negative effects of polygamy on society.
Rooted in Islam and the Qur’anic spirit of equity, Islamic feminism provides a credible political voice for women. It gives women’s organisations, women’s rights advocates, and gender scholars in the Muslim world legitimate grounds for action – and change – as fulfilment of society’s religious obligations.
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* Amal Mohammed Al-Malki is an assistant teaching professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and a member of the Qatar National Competitiveness Council, which promotes reform and transparency in the national economy. This article first appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGnews) as part of a series on Muslim women and their religious rights.

Pakistan Christian Post

Italian Magazine Tries to Narrow Gap With Muslims

Andrea Frazzetta for Yalla Italia

An editorial meeting of Yalla Italia, which runs articles on how Muslims relate to non-Muslims.

• By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

Published: April 4, 2009

MILAN — On one side of a drab street in working-class Milan, a squat structure houses a conservative mosque that was once believed to be a hub of radical Islam in Italy. Even now, after a government crackdown drove off extremists, the mosque’s deeply conservative members remain mostly aloof from Italian society.

Across the street, the newsroom of Yalla Italia (Let’s Go, Italy) churns out a magazine written by “2Gs” — or second-generation immigrants — that tries to introduce Italians to the cultures of its new residents and to help young Muslim immigrants navigate their dual identities.

The message behind articles and blog posts like “To wear or not to wear a burkini?” and “How to match kaftans with jeans” is clear: it is possible to assimilate without losing a Muslim identity.

“We’re separated by 10 meters, but culturally we’re centuries apart,” said Martino Pillitteri, Yalla Italia’s chief editor. He said he saw the differences between his mission and that of Muslim conservatives as symbolic of the divide in Italy’s Muslim population — “one vision driving toward the past, the other driving toward the future,” he said.

Mr. Pillitteri said he decided to start the magazine because he believed that the Italian media presented a very one-dimensional view of Muslims: one that was often negative and too frequently focused on radicals and suspected terrorists.

The magazine’s articles are rarely political, although it has taken on some causes, including championing changes in laws to make the children of immigrants citizens automatically if they are born in Italy, rather than requiring them to apply for citizenship after 18 years of residence.

Most of the articles focus on how Italy’s Muslims live and interact with non-Muslim Italians, covering such topics as mixed marriages and the conflict between the older, less assimilated generation of immigrants and their often more open children.

Mr. Pillitteri likes to say that Yalla Italia’s staff is the medium as well as the message. Most of the reporters are women, some of them traditional enough to wear head scarves, and nearly all work during the few hours a week they snatch from their university studies or day jobs. Some came to Italy as children, others were born here of mixed marriages, still others came to study and married.

Lubna Ammoune, 20, who blogs for Yalla Italia and for the online edition of the Turin daily La Stampa, said she thought that second-generation immigrants could be vital to integration.

“I like to think of us as a bridge,” said Ms. Ammoune, who is Milanese by birth but of Syrian origin.

Yalla Italia’s attempts to narrow the cultural divide come as Italians have grown more resentful of immigrants and as the government has taken an increasingly tough stand on immigration.

Under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the government has tightened immigration laws and increased security in cities as Italians’ fear of violent crimes by immigrants has risen.

The tough tone of the government and its allies was apparent in January when Italians reacted to protests by hundreds of Muslims in several Italian cities against the war in Gaza by praying in central squares (and therefore in front of cathedrals).

Giuseppe Pisanu, a former interior minister with Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party, said the protests were “a fundamentalist operation, the preliminaries of terrorism,” the ANSA news agency reported.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni of the anti-immigrant Northern League Party, warned that Italy risked “a situation like the Parisian banlieues,” the heavily immigrant, disaffected suburbs where rioting erupted in 2005.

Italy’s immigrants are relative newcomers, compared with those elsewhere in Europe, and the country is still struggling with how to deal with its growing foreign population. After the Italian Senate passed a bill toughening immigration policies in February, Famiglia Cristiana, an influential Roman Catholic magazine, accused Italy of plunging “into the abyss of racial laws,” a series of anti-Semitic measures that were passed by the Fascist government in 1938. The lower house still has to approve the bill, which would be one of the strictest in Europe.

“Italy hasn’t chosen a specific model yet for how it wants to deal with Islam,” said Farian Sabahi, a professor of history of Islamic countries at the University of Turin. “It hasn’t been a priority of the government, and that is embarrassing, because it goes against what other European countries are trying to do.”

Yalla Italia, first published in May 2007, appears as a monthly insert of Vita, a magazine geared to the nonprofit sector that has a circulation of 36,000. Vita’s Web site averages 250,000 visitors a month, magazine statistics showed.

For the most part, the articles in Yalla Italia do not try to preach change. Instead, they aim to encourage mutual understanding. One article, for instance, acknowledged how awkward it can be for young immigrants to watch Italian television, which features many scantily clad women, with their parents.

And in an issue on mixed marriages last year, couples shared their efforts at balancing cultures. “We live our cultural and religious differences like an enrichment for each other,” wrote Ali Hassoun, a citizen of Lebanese descent who is married to an Italian. He said their daughter “recites the Sura in the Koran, but asks Jesus for a baby sister.”

Yalla Italia hopes “to show Italians a constructive reality they don’t expect,” said Ouejdane Mejri, 32, a magazine contributor who came from Tunisia to study in Italy and now teaches information technology at Milan Polytechnic. “Immigrants are not just people who wash ashore on a beach. We pay taxes, participate in society, strive to integrate.

“We are the future of Italy,” she said, “and we want to be protagonists of that future.”

Italian Magazine Tries to Narrow Gap With Muslims - NYTimes.com