Dear HumanDHS network friends
Please find below the Common Ground Newsbulletin: 11-17 November 2008.
Kind regards
Brian Ward
Common Ground Newsbulletin
Inside this edition 11 - 17 November 2008
A role for religion in Turkish and Pakistani politics?
by Özlem Gemici and Rehan Rafay Jamil
Özlem Gemici, member of a Turkish think tank, and Rehan Rafay Jamil, a media consultant in Islamabad, outline the political trajectories of two of the Muslim world’s largest democracies – Pakistan and Turkey – and consider what actions must be taken to strengthen their democratic institutions.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 11 November 2008)
Hunger hinders development in Bangladesh
by Partha Shankar Saha
In addition to Bangladesh’s national food shortages and financial difficulty, the people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts region are also grappling with a severe plague of rats that is consuming local crops and key food sources. Partha Shankar Saha, coordinator of cultural programmes at the Society for Environment and Human Development, considers what can be done to meet these basic needs so development efforts can move forward.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 11 November 2008)
Teaching Auschwitz to the Palestinians
by Tim McGirk
Tim McGirk, the Jerusalem Bureau Chief for TIME Magazine, examines the efforts of one Arab, Khaled Kasab Mahameed, working against all odds “to educate Palestinians about the Jewish Holocaust.”
(Source: Time.com, 8 July 2008)
Yes we can, Middle East leaders tell Obama
by Sana Abdallah
Sana Abdallah, a journalist who works for UPI in Amman, examines the reactions of leaders in the Middle East in response to Barack Obama’s historic win in the US presidential elections.
(Source: Middle East Times, 5 November 2008)
Why I went to meet the Pope
by Tariq Ramadan
Professor of Islamic studies and senior research fellow at St. Antony’s College at Oxford University and at Lokahi Foundation, Tariq Ramadan looks back at Pope Benedict XVI’s comments at Regensburg in September 2006, which were widely as being divisive between Muslims and Christians, and argues for a positive partnership between adherents of both faiths.
(Source: TariqRamadan.com, 4 November 2008)
A role for religion in Turkish and Pakistani politics?
Özlem Gemici and Rehan Rafay Jamil
Istanbul/Islamabad - Pakistan and Turkey stand at a crossroads in their political evolutions. The democratically elected Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in Pakistan control both the presidencies and parliaments of their countries, ostensibly making them amongst the strongest elected governments in each of their respective histories.
Both the PPP and the AKP have promised to bring about much needed political and economic reform, but their sincerity and ability to undertake such initiatives is very much disputed.
The two countries’ political trajectories shed light on some of the changing political dynamics within Muslim countries. Turkey is frequently cited as a unique example of a secular democracy in the Muslim world. On the other end of the secularism spectrum is Pakistan, a country whose founding principles were based on the ideology of Muslim democracy.
Since independence, both countries’ politics have been dominated by large militaries, whose disproportionate economic and political power has been a significant obstacle for democratisation.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Turkish republic in 1923, ending more than 600 years of Ottoman rule. However, while the new republic was quick to adopt many of the cultural aspects of a Western country, creating a democratic political system proved much more difficult.
Even after Turkey transitioned into a multi-party political system in 1946, the military remained dominant in politics as the guardian of democracy and secularism. The military used this self-acclaimed guardianship as justification to legitimise its interventions, and thus Turkey witnessed military coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, followed by a quasi-coup in 1997 and numerous other unsuccessful attempts.
Each military intervention dominated the political sphere long after their one-to-three-year durations.
Pakistan, on the other hand, was created in 1947 as an independent homeland for Muslims of the Indian sub-continent. Although the founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had envisioned Pakistan as a modern Muslim democracy rather than a theocratic state, the role of religion in state affairs was ill-defined at the time of independence.
In fact, the issue of just how “Islamic” Pakistan should be is still debated by the country’s polity.
Like in Turkey, the Pakistani military dominated state affairs soon after independence. The country has witnessed four military coups and spent most of its 60 years of independence under military rule.
The initial years of the Turkish Kemalist state saw some of the most radical measures to expunge Islam from public life, such as the ban on women wearing headscarves and the closure of madrassas (Islamic religious schools).
Although some of the restrictions on religious practice were subsequently eased, the role of Islam in public life is still an extremely polarised debate in Turkey.
In July 2007, the AKP was elected to power for the second time. The electoral success of the AKP, a moderate, pro-Western, politicised Islamic party, has proven to be the litmus test of Turkish democracy.
Although the AKP promised to uphold the secular traditions of Turkey, its religious roots made it anathema to the military establishment.
In March 2008, Turkey’s Constitutional Court attempted to ban the AKP from politics. Although the Court eventually voted against banning the party, the case was welcomed by the military establishment.
However, it caused an uproar in Turkish civil society.
In April 2008, following the AKP’s nomination of Abdullah Gül as President, the military made a statement denouncing the rising religious sentiments in the country and warned that it would not hesitate to defend Turkey’s secular principles.
This was interpreted by many commentators as a thinly disguised threat of a fourth military coup and a stark reminder of the military’s distrust of a political party which had won over 46 percent of the popular vote.
While Turkey struggled to create a new secular order by suppressing religious tendencies, Pakistan tried to forge a sense of nationhood based on ideals of Muslim nationhood. Thus, the existence of Islam in Pakistani politics is a natural, albeit contested, ligature of its creation.
During the period of military rule in Pakistan in the 1980s, General Zia ul Haq’s policy of state-led “Islamisation”, an attempt to appeal to Pakistan’s religious right, aimed to restructure the institutions of Pakistan into an Islamic state.
But state efforts in both countries to define the role of Islam in politics and society have not gone uncontested. In the last two decades, there has been a grassroots mobilisation of political Islam in Turkey in spite of state restrictions.
In Pakistan, Islamic parties that want a more politicised role for religion have been unable to make a significant impact at the ballot box, despite successive attempts by the state to co-opt them. They have, however, benefited greatly from state patronage, particularly during periods of military rule.
In fact, General Pervez Musharraf, though viewed in the West as a secular ally in a volatile region, also allied himself with a coalition of religious political parties in a bid to gain political legitimacy.
In order for these fledgling democracies to be strengthened so that they don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, it is important that the AKP and PPP’s political mandates be respected.
The two political parties, no matter how flawed they are, need to engage in the political process uninterrupted. The most critical challenge for both countries is strengthening independent institutions such as free media, an independent judiciary and an active “watchdog” civil society that will hold elected governments accountable and ensure they act within a constitutional framework - a role monopolised by the military for far too long.
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* Özlem Gemici lives in Istanbul, where she works with a think tank focusing on Turkey’s foreign policy, democratisation and governance issues. Rehan Rafay Jamil is a media consultant who lives in Islamabad and writes on issues related to democratisation and foreign policy in Pakistan. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 11 November 2008, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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Hunger hinders development in Bangladesh
Partha Shankar Saha
Dhaka - Food prices in Bangladesh have doubled over the last few months, as they have elsewhere in the world. The country already suffers from food shortages and financial difficulties regularly caused by cyclones and other natural disasters. And Bangladesh is currently sitting at number 70 (out of 88) on the Global Hunger Index.
When such basic needs are not being met, the development required to foster functioning democracies often takes a back seat.
This need is amplified in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of southeast Bangladesh where for over a year a plague of rats, attracted by the flowers of the bamboo plants that bloom once every 50 years or so, but can flower for up to three years when they do bloom, has been destroying crops in Bangladesh with catastrophic results.
What may seem like the setting of a science fiction movie to some is altogether too real a scenario for people like Aung Khei Marma, a 70-year-old farmer and a father of six. He lives with his wife in the hill village of Majher Para in one of the three hill districts of CHT. The harvest from his plot of land feeds him and his wife for half the year.
Aung Khei and his wife then collect and sell bamboo from the forest to feed themselves for the other half of the year.
Bamboo is a symbol of life for Aung Khei and others living in this region. It provides vital income in the 5,093 square miles that make up the CHT, and 10 percent of Bangladesh. But since 2006 bamboo seems to have been at the centre of a catastrophe for Aung Khei Marma and the other 150 families in his community, who now rely on governmental and international aid to meet their basic food needs until the plague of rats is over.
To the hill dwellers of this region, bamboo blossoming is a sign of impending famine. Once a bamboo grove begins to flower and bear fruit, the region is soon plagued with a massive influx of rats, known as a rat flood.
They multiply quickly through reproduction, consuming the bamboo fruit and moving on to pumpkins, potatoes, paddies and other crops planted in the area.
For example, of the 24 kilograms of paddy seeds Aung Khei sowed in 2007, three-quarters of it was consumed by rats. Others in the village suffered a similar fate.
Indigenous leaders of the CHT blame the food crisis on the mismanagement of the country’s Development Board, which was created following a peace agreement between the Bangladeshi government and the region’s people, who had been fighting for indigenous rights and special status.
As of May 2008 the government had sanctioned Tk 2.2 million (32,460 USD) to combat the food shortages in different regions of the CHT. However, this amount has not been enough and international donor agencies have had to step in.
UNDP is taking the lead in implementing development projects in the CHT, where they distributed packages of rice, salt, dried shrimp powder and rat traps to 7,000 of the worst affected households. CARITAS, the World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization, amongst others, are also running programmes to assist those in need.
A well-coordinated plan and concerted effort between the Bangladeshi government, the people of the CHT and international agencies is necessary to tackle this situation.
Despite the predictability of this 50-year event, local inhabitants are unable to stockpile enough food to prepare for the famine they fear. The government must lead the effort by coordinating all affected parties to act collectively to address such disasters. The government should strengthen local administrative bodies, such as hill district counsels, to address such calamities.
To reduce the dependency on bamboo, the government should initiate technical training programs such as textile manufacturing and other cottage industries, encouraging alternative livelihoods.
Local non-governmental organisations must tackle problems like the rat flood in their agendas and take precautionary measures. They can create emergency relief funds to deal with the threats of famine in the short term.
For example, in addition to reporting on the rat flood to raise awareness, the Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD), in cooperation with the local social organisation Tripura Kalyan Foundation, has responded to the plight of 55 affected families in the Ruilui and Longlar villages of the CHT by providing them with food packages.
In the longer term, these organisations can provide training for families on alternative agricultural practices such as horticulture, homestead gardening, poultry, etc. – particularly those practices that won’t be affected by future plagues of rats.
The damage due to this most recent rat flood has already begun in the CHT; however, farmers and their families can still benefit from additional help. Intensified relief efforts, coupled with prevention programmes can mitigate the impacts of future famines on the inhabitants of the region and to enable the country to move beyond hunger in their development programme.
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* Partha Shankar Saha is the coordinator of cultural programmes for the Bangladeshi non-governmental organisation, Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD). This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 11 November 2008, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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Teaching Auschwitz to the Palestinians
Tim McGirk
Nablus, West Bank - As the road dips and rises through the Hebron hills, white etched with the glowing green of vineyards, the turn-off to Edna village is marked by the grey, concrete watchtower of an Israeli checkpoint. But it doesn’t deter Israeli-Arab lawyer Khaled Kasab Mahameed from his quixotic mission: he has come to the West Bank to educate Palestinians about the Jewish Holocaust.
Many Palestinians have never heard that the Nazis killed six million Jews during Word War II — it doesn’t rate a mention in their school history books. Others join with the likes of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in denying that the Holocaust ever happened. The Jews, according to this blinkered reasoning, are their enemies in the battle over the Holy Land, and one cannot afford to have sympathy for their enemy.
Mahameed sees this view as tragically misguided. The key to the Palestinians achieving their own goals, he says, is to understand the Holocaust, and the place it holds in the Israeli psyche and its obsession with security.
But in Edna, Mahameed faces a tough crowd: the walls are bedecked with posters of Palestinians killed while fighting the Israelis, and at least three of the seven middle-aged men sitting beside me drinking tea with a sprig of sage have endured long stretches in Israeli prisons. Twice in the past few years, bulldozers rumbled out from the nearby Israeli checkpoint to demolish the two-story home and ancient vineyards of our host, geologist Taleb al-Harithi.
Armed with an Israeli court order, he managed to turn the bulldozers away, but he fears their return at any moment.
Mahameed passes around a death-camp photo of a Jewish inmate standing over a mass grave full of naked corpses. The room of Palestinians falls silent. “That man, that survivor, in the photograph came to Israel.
Can you imagine the nightmares, the horrors that he brought with him? It’s a suffering that nobody, not even us Palestinians, can begin to comprehend”, he says with quiet, lawyerly persistence. The photo moves around the room, again and again, in silence.
Finally, a retired Palestinian general, Abdul Latah Solimia, once captive in an Israeli military prison in Lebanon says: “As a militant, I know the cost of war and hatred. For 60 years, we have tried to eliminate each other, and neither has won. We Israelis and Palestinians should share this land.”
Mahameed’s epiphany about the Holocaust occurred three years ago, when he took his two children to see the massive 20-foot high concrete wall that Israel has erected around parts of Jerusalem to keep out Palestinians. It is so high in places that it seems to slice the blue sky in half.
“I told my son to break off a piece of the wall as a souvenir. It was very difficult, and while he was trying, I asked myself, what would drive the Israelis to do such a thing to us, build such a monstrosity as this wall?” He gathered his son and daughter and drove them to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum. “It was very moving. I couldn’t breathe. Six million. It’s like something off another planet”, he recalls.
Using photos donated by Yad Vashem and images from the Naqba — the “Catastrophe”, which is how Palestinians refer to the events surrounding Israel’s independence which left thousands of Palestinians in exile and in refugee camps — the lawyer set up a one-room museum in his hometown of Nazareth, called the Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education. Every week, he travels to towns, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank trying to enlighten his fellow Palestinians. Says Mahameed, “Even with the militants, when I explain to them that Israel’s brutal policies in the Palestinian territories stem from the Holocaust, they tell me ‘You’re bringing us an atomic bomb. We need to think about this.’”
Sometimes, his message is greeted with hostility — even in his own family. Mahameed has been ostracised by his brothers, who say that his obsession with the Holocaust is tantamount to sympathising with Israel.
Last week, one of his lectures in a refugee camp was cancelled because a militant group spread the false rumour that he was secretly on Israeli payroll.
On the Israeli side, there is incomprehension, too. Only last January Yad Vashem put up an Arabic language website on the Holocaust. When asked about Mahameed’s activities, one staffer replied warily: “We have doubts about his agenda.” Replies Mahameed: “They don’t want us Palestinians to have pity on them. They only want to show us how mighty they are.”
Mahameed is an avid believer in Mahatma Gandhi’s dictum that truth leads to non-violence, and he sees himself practicing a kind of jujitsu, using Israel’s own moral superiority over the Holocaust as a way to shame the Israeli occupiers in the West Bank into treating the Palestinians more humanely. “If the Israelis believe that the Holocaust justifies this kind of brutal discrimination, then they’re wrong.”
He travels through army checkpoints showing his ID card and a photo from Auschwitz. At first he’s met with suspicion.
“I tell the soldiers that this could be a photo of their grandfather, and that I understand that they, as Jews, are unique victims. But the paradox is that we Palestinians have the Holocaust on our shoulders, too.”
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* Tim McGirk is the Jerusalem Bureau Chief for TIME Magazine. This abridged article originally appeared in Time.com and is distributed with permission from the author by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews). The full text can be found at www.time.com .
Source: Time.com, 8 July 2008, www.time.com
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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Yes we can, Middle East leaders tell Obama
Sana Abdallah
Amman - Leaders across the Middle East congratulated Barack Obama on his historic election victory as the 44th president of the United States. Many anticipated that his administration would usher in a fresh new policy and approach that would bring peace to a region plunged into great turbulence during the past eight years of the George W. Bush presidency.
Some Arab leaders, who are traditionally allied with Washington, welcomed Obama’s victory, just as they had been expected to do had Republican candidate John McCain won.
But on an unofficial level, there was a sense of relief – albeit cautious – that the White House will, for the next four years, host an African-American president whose 22-month campaign showed him as an advocate of peace and dialogue with a will to resolve conflicts.
Obama’s words in his victory speech gave a significant push to the optimists who had high hopes that he will look more favourably toward the rest of the world and perhaps Arab causes.
These Obama supporters have in recent months come under criticism by the many sceptical Arab talking heads who believed Obama would not bring change to what they say is a deeply-rooted US Middle East policy leaning toward Israel.
But Obama provided relevant assuring words to the world: “All those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world: our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared. A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”
>From the early hours of Tuesday in the region, people were glued to their television sets as popular Arab news channels offered live coverage from the moment the polls opened until the two American candidates gave their victory and concession speeches.
Critics say the interest in this US election was unprecedented, thanks to the unparalleled damage that the George W. Bush administration brought to the region as a result of the so-called “war on terror” and by pressurising the United States’ Arab allies into submitting to his unpopular militaristic policies.
In their congratulatory messages to Obama, some Arab leaders said they hope the Democratic president-elect would engage positively in bringing a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said: “We await your constructive participation toward a solution to the Palestinian question and the realisation of a just and comprehensive peace, which is the main condition for security and stability in the Middle East.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been stumbling through peace negotiations with Israel since Bush re-launched them at Annapolis a year ago, almost echoed Mubarak’s words to Obama.
Abbas said he hoped the new president would “speed up efforts to achieve peace, particularly since a resolution of the Palestinian problem and the Arab-Israeli conflict is key to world peace.”
Israel seemed more confident that an Obama administration would not change US policy and apply pressure on the Jewish state to make peace with the Palestinians by stopping the settlement activities, removing roadblocks and ultimately withdrawing from the West Bank.
Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he expected US-Israeli ties to become stronger, because of the “special relationship” between the two countries.
Hamas, the Islamic Palestinian political movement that rules the Gaza Strip and is on the United States’ “terrorist list”, said it hopes Obama will “learn from the mistakes of the previous administrations, including those of Bush, which have destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine”, according to Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum.
The Iraqi government, meanwhile, said it did not expect any policy change under Obama that would see a quick withdrawal of more than 140,000 US troops from the country, invaded by US-led forces in 2003 in a war that the newly-elected president had opposed from the outset.
But the anti-American “Sadrists”, followers of Iranian-backed Shi’a cleric Moqtada Sadr, saw in Obama’s victory a “wish of the American public to withdraw forces from Iraq”, in line with this group’s demands.
Iranian politicians also welcomed Obama’s election as a positive development, saying his win against McCain reflects an expression of the failures and defeats of Bush’s foreign policies.
They hope that the next administration will learn from the mistakes of the outgoing government in Washington.
On an official level, Tehran will wait and see if Obama’s foreign policy will be different from Bush’s hostile approach toward Iran. But reports from Tehran indicate cautious optimism that Obama will make good on his call for dialogue with Iran to resolve the nuclear standoff with the West, and perhaps pave the way for restoring ties that have been severed between the two since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Syria, which the Bush administration had blacklisted as a “sponsor of terrorism”, hoped Obama’s election will “help change US policy from one of wars and embargos to one of diplomacy and dialogue”, according to Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal.
In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai called on the next administration in Washington to change its strategy in the so-called “war on terror”, saying it “cannot be fought in Afghan villages…but should be directed to [terrorist] nests and training centres.”
Karzai urged Obama to end civilian casualties in Afghanistan, where 70,000 US-led NATO forces have been unsuccessfully battling the Taliban and other armed insurgents.
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* Sana Abdallah is a Jordanian journalist who works for UPI in Amman. This abridged article originally appeared in the Middle East Times and is distributed with permission by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews). The full text can be found at www.metimes.com .
Source: Middle East Times, 5 November 2008, www.metimes.com
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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Why I went to meet the Pope
Tariq Ramadan
London - Now that the shock waves touched off by Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks at Regensburg on 12 September 2006 have subsided, the overall consequences have proven more positive than negative. Above and beyond polemics, the Pope’s lecture has heightened general awareness of their respective responsibilities among Christians and Muslims in the West.
It matters little whether the Pope had simply misspoken or, as the highest-ranking authority of the Catholic Church, was enunciating church policy. Now the issue is one of identifying those areas in which a full-fledged debate between Catholicism and Islam must take place. Papal references to “jihad” and “Islamic violence” came as a shock to Muslims, even though they were drawn from a quotation attributed to Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos.
It is clear that the time has come to open debate on the common theological underpinnings and the shared foundations of the two religions. The appeal by Muslim religious leaders, “A Common Word”, had precisely this intention: our traditions have the same source, the same single God who calls upon us to respect human dignity and liberty.
These same traditions raise identical questions concerning the ultimate purpose of human activity, and respect for ethical principles.
In a world that is experiencing an unprecedented global crisis, a world in which politics, finance and relations between humans and the environment suffer from a cruel lack of conscience and ethical integrity, it is a matter of greatest urgency that Christian-Muslim dialogue turn its attention to both theological issues and to those of values and ultimate aims.
Our task is not to create a new religious alliance against the “secularised” and “immoral” world order, but to make a constructive contribution to the debate, to prevent the logic of economics and war from destroying what remains of our common humanity.
Our constructive dialogue on shared values and ultimate goals is far more vital and imperative than our rivalries over the number of believers, our contradictory claims about proselytism and sterile competition over exclusive possession of the truth.
Those dogma-ridden individuals who, in both religions, claim truth for themselves are, in fact, working against their respective beliefs.
Whoever claims that he/she alone possesses the truth, that “falsehood belongs to everybody else…” has already fallen into error. Our dialogue must resist the temptation of dogmatism by drawing upon a comprehensive, critical and constantly respectful confrontation of ideas.
Ours must be a dialogue whose seriousness requires of us, above all else, humility.
We must delve deep into history the better to engage a true dialogue of civilisations. Fear of the present can impose upon the past its own biased vision. Surprisingly, the Pope asserted that Europe’s roots were Greek and Christian, as if responding to the perceived threat of the Muslim presence in Europe.
His reading, as I noted after the lecture at Regensburg, is a reductive one.
We must return to the factual reality of the past, to the history of ideas. When we do so, it quickly becomes clear that the so-called opposition between the West and the Muslim world is pure projection, an ideological instrument if you will, designed to construct entities that can be opposed or invited to dialogue, depending on circumstances.
But the West has been shaped by Muslims, just as the Muslim world has been shaped by the West; it is imperative that a critical internal process of reflection begin: that the West and Europe initiate an internal debate, exactly as must Islam and the Muslims, with a view to reconciling themselves with the diversity and the plurality of their respective pasts.
The debate between faith and reason, and over the virtues of rationalism, is a constant in both civilisations, and is, as such, far from exclusive to the Greek or Christian heritage. Neither is it the sole prerogative of the Enlightenment.
The Pope’s remarks at Regensburg have opened up new areas of inquiry that must be explored and exploited in a positive way, with a view to building bridges and, working hand-in-hand, to seek a common response to the social, cultural and economic challenges of our day.
It is in this spirit that I participated on 4-6 November in Rome, and in a meeting with the Pope on 6 November. Our task was to assume our respective and shared responsibilities, and to commit ourselves to working for a more just world, in full respect of beliefs and liberties.
It is essential, then, to speak of freedom of conscience, of places of worship, of the “argument of reciprocity”; all questions are possible in an atmosphere of mutual confidence and respect.
Still, it is essential that each of us sit down at the table with the humility that consists of not assuming that we alone possess the truth; with the respect that requires that we listen to our neighbours and recognise their differences; and, finally, the coherence that summons each of us to maintain a critical outlook in accepting the contradictions that may exist between the message and the practice of believers.
These are the essential elements to be respected if we are to succeed.
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* Tariq Ramadan is a professor of Islamic studies and senior research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University and at Lokahi Foundation in London. He is also president of the European think tank, the European Muslim Network (EMN), in Brussels.
For more information about “A Common Word” please visit www.acommonword.com . This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from the author.
Source: TariqRamadan.com, 4 November 2008, www.tariqramadan.com
Copyright permission is granted for publication.