Dear HumanDHS network friends
Please find below the Common Ground Newsbulletin - 14 April 2009.
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Brian Ward
Common Ground Newsbulletin
Inside this edition 14 - 01 April 2009
Sisters in the Muslim Brotherhood
by Omayma Abdel-Latif
In this third article in a series on Muslim women and their religious rights, Omayma Abdel-Latif, a research and programme associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, explores the little-known struggle of women in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 14 April 2009)
In today’s world, anyone might…
by Naif Al-Mutawa
Naif Al-Mutawa, creator of the comic book, The 99, explains the dangers inherent in his Muslim students’ association of their faith with extremism.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 14 April 2009)
A vital medium
by Khaled Diab
Brussels-based journalist and writer Khaled Diab explains how media can become a channel for new approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 14 April 2009)
~Youth Views~ Taking dialogue to the next level
by Joshua M. Z. Stanton
Joshua M. Z. Stanton, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, explains why this new online journal is willing to do what many current interfaith initiatives won’t.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 14 April 2009)
Obama is getting Turkey right
by Mustafa Akyol
Columnist and writer Mustafa Akyol analyses US President Barack Obama’s recent speech at the Turkish parliament and concludes that he is spot on: there is indeed more to Turkey than can be captured by the “secular republic” versus “democracy” debate.
(Source: Hürriyet Daily News, 9 April 2009)
Sisters in the Muslim Brotherhood
Omayma Abdel-Latif
Beirut - In 2007, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood stated that its vision was based on “complete equality” between men and women while preserving their different social roles. The Brotherhood also stressed the need to empower women so they might acquire rights in the public sphere that do not conflict with society’s basic values.
The statement also referred to the “dominating negative social view regarding women” and the need to change it by making society fully aware of women’s rights beyond the right to education, which is widely accepted in Egyptian society.
Two years after this stated vision of gender equality, however, and 85 years after schoolteacher Hassan al Banna founded the Brotherhood in Egypt in 1924, the current status and role of women in the Muslim Brotherhood’s organisational structure remains lacking.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s first women’s division, the Muslim Sisters Group, was created in 1932. Since then, women activists have been at the forefront of the social and political struggle of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt, which seeks to establish a democratic political system in the country with an Islamic frame of reference.
Women activists advocating for an Islamic political system through the Brotherhood believe that Islam brought justice to women. Their lack of equal rights presently, they insist, has to do more with the cultural, political and social realities in which their movement functions than with the movement itself.
Still, more and more female members of the Muslim Brotherhood are becoming restless about the lack of representation and are seeking ways to increase their numbers in senior positions in the movement itself and, in time, to participate more in the country’s politics. Primarily, these women want a formal consultative position in the Muslim Brotherhood hierarchy.
Fortunately for the Sisters, some of the leading figures in this group of Brotherhood women are daughters and wives of senior Brotherhood leaders.
The daughters of higher-ranking members like Khayrat al-Shater and Essam al-Erayan, for example, are active Sisters. The first of the Brotherhood’s female political candidates, Jihan al-Halafawi, is the wife of Ibrahim al-Zaafarani, a senior member of the Alexandria chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. Due to these connections, women are making their voices heard despite the lack of an institutionalised mechanism to consult women at the higher levels of power.
Furthermore, a growing number of men in the Brotherhood are now convinced that the current status of women inside the Muslim Brotherhood is a “weak point” that needs to be seriously addressed. The Brotherhood is routinely criticised for its position on women’s issues, especially since it presents itself as liberal with regard to politics yet is perceived as conservative when it comes to women’s issues. The majority of this pro-women group occupies mid-level positions in the movement and is calling for increased women’s leadership within the organisation, as well as a greater number of female Muslim Brotherhood candidates in national elections.
Many refer to this redefining of women’s roles within the movement as a “rebellion of the Sisters”. But members of the Brotherhood consider this call for greater women’s participation normal as the movement evolves over time to accommodate a dynamic constituency and changing political and social factors.
While these women activists have genuine grievances and demand change, they are not willing to sacrifice the movement’s unity and cohesion to obtain increased representation in the Muslim Brotherhood and among political candidates. Many of them strongly feel that it is only a matter of time before they gain these rights. Their institutional loyalties and belief that change is possible, albeit gradually, shape their call for action.
And their calls are being heard. In Egypt’s 2000 parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood nominated a female candidate, Jihan al-Halafawi, for the first time – mostly due to pressures exerted by many of the Sisters. Although the government eventually ensured her defeat (for being a Brotherhood candidate, not for gender reasons) by rigging the vote, harassing her supporters and arresting her husband and campaign manager, Al-Halafawi had a strong backing from the public. And while neither of the two women candidates (including Makarem al-Deeri in 2005) nominated by the Muslim Brotherhood have been elected thus far, their popularity and support still set an important precedent.
A conservative culture in the Brotherhood, coupled with an oppressive socio-political context – which the movement sometimes appears to mirror – is why women in the Brotherhood fail to acquire adequate representation reflective of their contribution to the movement’s political struggle.
Integrating women in the Brotherhood’s organisational structure will help alter the perception that it is as patriarchal and undemocratic as the regime it challenges. It will also give recognition to the central role played by women in the movement’s social and political struggles.
The question now is whether the emergence of a young generation of activists – men and women alike – will ultimately generate a new political force which could prove crucial to the Muslim Brotherhood as a whole, indirectly affecting the social and political culture in Egypt.
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* Omayma Abdel-Latif is a research and programme associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. This article is part of a series on Muslim women and their religious rights written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 14 April 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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In today’s world, anyone might…
Naif Al-Mutawa
Kuwait City - It was the first time I realised that the very bright, young and privileged can also be very foolish. In the summer of 1989, a couple of my American friends, dressed in Arab garb borrowed from me and toting water rifles, “terrorised” the campus of Brown University.
A day after my friends staged their “attack”, an Arab American student called a public meeting to protest the racism of the stunt. Why was he so upset?
I didn’t get it then. Now I do.
During a recent lecture on the biological bases of behaviour, I passed out two articles to my medical students at Kuwait University, one from the New York Times and the other from New York Magazine. I had deleted all clues as to the identity of the subjects and the locations in the stories. I asked the students to read the articles and guess where the stories had taken place.
The first article concerned a group of clerics, known as the “Party of [God]”, who advocated serious consequences for those caught romancing on Valentine’s Day. They warned that St. Valentine was a Christian saint and that celebrating this day was therefore strictly against their religion. And they threatened to immediately marry off any couples caught flirting. Opponents described the clerics’ behaviour as “Talibanisation.”
My students imagined these hardliners harassing the poor romantics, and they were unanimous: this fiasco could only have taken place in Saudi Arabia.
But my students were wrong. In fact, the incident took place in India and the deity in question was a Hindu god. Allah caught a break on that one.
In the second article I gave the students, a woman complained that “stupid Talibans” had assailed her immediately after a gentleman stranger stopped her on the street to comment on how cute her baby was. When the man left, three minivans immediately surrounded the woman. Half a dozen bearded men jumped out and began interrogating her on the street: “Who was he? What did he want?”
This time, the students were deadlocked on the location – evenly split between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Fixed in their minds were images of stick-wielding morality police on the streets of Kabul or Riyadh.
It shattered the students’ mental images to find out that this “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” was roaming the streets of New York, and that the religion in question was Judaism. Once again, Allah was not implicated.
It has been shown that chimpanzees will go to war to protect their territory. I argued to my students that aggression toward others who don’t share one’s beliefs is nothing more than war over intellectual territory; religious faith is an intellectual line in the air. I concluded by saying that the religious extremists must be right about Darwin: clearly, there are no signs of evolution here.
My intent was to advance the notion that extremism is nothing more than a bunch of neurotransmitters working overtime – or perhaps under time. It is not Islam or Judaism or Hinduism that creates extremism; rather, some people are predisposed to extremism and will pursue it in any faith.
Yet it was fascinating to see that my students in Kuwait, by opting for Saudi Arabia as a likely location of both stories, seemed to associate their own faith, Islam, with extremism.
The fact is that, in today’s world, anyone would have reached a similar conclusion. In the age of the internet and satellite television, my students are not shielded from the misconceptions and misrepresentations of their faith any more than the Arab American student at Brown had been.
But if Muslims grow up to identify extremism with Islam, and to believe that to be an accurate reflection of their religion, then we will have a far bigger problem than we ever could have imagined. Passing off aberration as the norm is a danger to all of us. And constantly setting the record right on what is and isn’t Islam is the duty of every able communicator in today’s multimedia world.
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* Naif Al-Mutawa is the creator of The 99, a group of superheroes based on Islamic archetypes. This article first appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer and was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 14 April 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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A vital medium
Khaled Diab
Brussels - Although the Israeli-Palestinian media battlefield is bitter and deeply entrenched, journalists have a responsibility to venture into the no man’s land between the two sides, even if it means getting caught in the crossfire.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most protracted and bitter in the world. The acrimony and polarisation associated with the conflict has transformed the media itself into a veritable battlefield. In fact, the question of bias itself has become its own theatre in the media wars, with one camp accusing the media of possessing an anti-Israeli slant, while the other alleges an anti-Palestinian bias. The exchange of fire over this issue became particularly heated during the recent war in Gaza.
Faced with such hostility, even the most well-intentioned and balanced journalist can get caught in the crossfire. Nevertheless, it is crucial that more journalists, particularly Israeli and Palestinian ones, abandon the narrow “us and them” dichotomy and pursue a line that is fair to both sides.
While the power of the media should not be overstated, it has the potential either to fuel the conflict by entrenching and confirming negative stereotypes, perpetuating hostility and beating the drums of war, or to advance the quest for peace by challenging and changing people’s perceptions, building understanding and mending fences.
So, what can the media do to be more constructive?
The media should highlight positives and not just fixate on negatives. In Western media it often seems that the Middle East produces little other than violence. We all know that violence makes headlines, but non-violence and grassroots peace efforts should also be given prominent coverage. The Palestinian, Arab and Israeli media all need to dedicate more coverage to positive stories from the other side and not always view the other through the prism of the conflict. They also need to dedicate more space to building a deeper understanding of the cultural and social make-up of the other side.
The media should be a channel for creative and novel approaches to the conflict, as well as a conduit for debate. Online forums and social networking sites are playing a crucial role in this respect by enabling Arabs and Israelis to cross geographical and political divides and communicate directly.
Opinion writers and columnists can also exercise significant influence. Column writing is about opinion and opinion is essentially subjective. But subjectivity, if coupled with balance, can be extremely helpful.
Personally, I try to use my Guardian column as a platform to humanise both sides of the conflict, uphold consistent values when judging actions, challenge perceptions, think outside the box, and reflect the complex human, social and cultural reality of the two peoples in order to give space to those who dare to cross “enemy lines”. In one series of articles I tackled head-on the stereotypes and misperceptions Arabs and Israelis have about each other. I have also explored alternative routes to peace, such as non-violence and civil rights movements.
More creatively, I once wrote a column where I imagined a fictional and peaceful future in 2048, which led one reader to point-out an essay-writing contest (sponsored by the non-profit organisation One Voice and distributed by the Common Ground News Service) in which Israeli and Palestinian kids imagined their own peaceful futures. I was so moved by their visions that I used another column to urge adults to “let the children take over the peace process and bring to it the sensibility and competence of childhood”.
My approach has come under fire from both pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians, often in reaction to the same text. Despite the entrenched hostility, such an approach does pay dividends. It is heartening to see that reaching common ground is possible. As one reader pointed out: “One-sided historical narratives are toxic. In attempting a unified narrative, you’re doing good work.” Another wrote: “Thanks for this encouraging article that can positively challenge everybody’s perceptions of this conflict.”
I am often pleasantly surprised by the maturity of the debate that develops between readers of my articles. It is truly inspiring to see how constructive the voices of the “silent majority” can be when brought into the debate. That is why a more balanced media is essential if we want to see a positive outcome to this conflict.
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* Khaled Diab is a Brussels-based journalist, columnist for The Guardian and writer. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 14 April 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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~Youth Views~ Taking dialogue to the next level
Joshua M. Z. Stanton
Jerusalem - In recent years, peacebuilders have recognised the need for interfaith discussion. It is no longer difficult to find a medium for dialogue. Churches, mosques, temples and synagogues, as well as a myriad of non-profit organisations, offer programmes centred on dialogue between members of different religious traditions. Yet many of these well-intentioned initiatives succumb to an unproductive default: we are all really just the same.
Fundamentally rooted in politeness, such notions overlook the differences that do exist between religious traditions and inhibit conversation about the topics that actually cause friction between communities. The real challenge in interfaith dialogue is finding a way to effectively engage difficult topics. Doing so holds the potential to bring a deeper level of understanding between religious communities and a significant reduction in tension.
Recently, I had the chance to meet with Muslim and Jewish high school students participating in the Face to Face programme, sponsored by the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI). The group is said to be the only inter-religious programme for youth in Israel that continued to meet regularly even after the outbreak of the recent conflict in Gaza.
Their strategy for success was not to avoid feelings of anger and grief in the course of meetings, but to guide the expression of these sentiments.
Some Muslim students in the group had relatives living in Gaza who were directly impacted by the war. Some of the Jewish students worried about siblings in the Israeli military and the threat of Hamas rocket strikes against civilian areas in Israel. Many of the group’s meetings during and after the war were tense, with voices raised and tears shed.
But because of careful facilitation by the groups’ leaders – who provided simultaneous translations in Hebrew and Arabic and encouraged students to focus on issues surrounding the war rather than blaming one another for its occurrence – the group held together.
Just a couple of months after the war, the students were able to sit together again and laugh over a meal of hummus and falafel. As one student proudly reflected, eliciting nods from other participants, “If we were able to get through those times without hating each other, nothing can keep us from being friends.”
The recently-founded Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue (www.irdialogue.org) hopes to follow the ICCI’s example by facilitating dialogue about social, political and cultural issues affecting religious communities around the world, including those most challenging to discuss.
By approaching contentious issues in an academic manner, it will provide a new means of engaging on matters that often underlie inter-religious interaction but are seldom discussed. In so doing, we hope to provide a stronger basis for collaborative efforts and intellectual cross-pollination between religious communities.
The journal began to take shape in June 2008, when I approached Stephanie Hughes, Student Senate co-Chair at Union Theological Seminary, with an idea for a kind of inter-religious publication that goes a step beyond the present literature on inter-religious dialogue. As a rabbinical student, I felt motivated to find a partner from another religious background equally invested in the ideas of mutual respect, learning and collaboration.
Having formed a strong partnership, the two of us set off to found what became the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue Neither of us held a PhD, but both of us felt compelled by our traditions to contribute to inter-religious work and study. In recognising our own limited experience in formal academic scholarship, we found a niche as facilitators who could both encourage and guide discussions.
While the first issue of the journal, scheduled for release on 1 May 2009, will be dedicated to the dynamics of dialogue itself, subsequent issues will address topics that participants in inter-religious dialogue often shy away from. Thus the second issue in October 2009 will be entitled, “Engaging the Taboo: Gender, the Body, and Sexuality in our Religious Traditions”, and the third issue in March 2010 will focus on the role that religion can play in both fomenting and preventing violence.
The journal’s goal is to bring scholars together with activists and non-profit leaders to discuss these topics. By drawing members of all three groups together to learn, discuss and debate on a free online platform, we hope to promote innovative programming within the field. Moreover, because of its electronic format, the journal will be accessible to an international audience of seminarians, professors, and religious and civic leaders. The inter-religious dialogue, work and scholarship will often take place locally, but lessons learnt can be applied globally.
By engaging with some of the most difficult, yet important, topics in interfaith dialogue, we know these lessons will be worthwhile.
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* Joshua Stanton is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue (www.irdialogue.org) and a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 14 April 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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Obama is getting Turkey right
Mustafa Akyol
Istanbul - The trip to Turkey by US President Barack Hussein Obama, as people loved to emphasise here, was a big success. Except for a few hundred “anti-imperialist”, lefty protestors who hit the streets chanting, “Yankee go home”, most Turks welcomed him calmly and some even fondly.
Some nationalists, including Nationalist Action Party, or MHP, leader Devlet Bahçeli, didn’t like what he said about Turkish-Armenian relations – or rather, the lack thereof. But that’s quite normal. The Armenian lobby in the United States, which is no fan of Turkey, didn’t like the way he handled that issue either. The disapproval of extremists on both sides of a question is often the indicator of a fair position.
Personally speaking, I very much liked Obama’s messages. The steps he suggested that Turkey take were completely reasonable. Of course, we need to introduce further reforms to honour the rights of our Kurdish citizens and religious minorities. To be sure, the Halki Seminary – the main school of theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church’s Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople – unwisely closed by the Turkish authorities in 1971, needs to be reopened. This is all Democracy 101.
Democracy 102, if you will, was hidden in Obama’s semantics. In the speech he delivered at the Turkish Parliament, for example, he used a term that we Turks should well note: “secular democracy”. This came as he was speaking about the heritage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the country’s founder. “His greatest legacy is Turkey’s strong and secular democracy”, Obama said. “And that is the work that this assembly carries on today.”
While it may not seem like rocket science, that formulation is actually quite brilliant. Because the term, “secular democracy” is not common in Turkey’s political language. We generally, rather, use two different terms: “Secular republic” (laik cumhuriyet) and “democracy” (demokrasi). And these two are sometimes seen as alternatives to each other. Military coups are made, and justified, in the name of the secular republic. And democracy is often loathed by the latter’s zealous defenders as a counter-revolution to theirs.
But what is good in a secular republic if is not democratic? The Soviet Union, for example, was a secular republic, but it really was not the place you would want to live in if you have an aspiration for things like civil liberties. The same can be said for North Korea, Red China or Saddam’s Iraq. They all had official ideologies (Kim Il Sungism, Maoism and Baathism, respectively) that were as secular as they could be. And they all defined themselves as republics. Are you impressed?
What is much better, of course, is to have a democratic ideal, not an official ideology, as the basis of a state. And secularity is only meaningful if it serves this democratic ideal. What secularity does in that context is to save the state, and thus the society, from the dominance of a religious doctrine. But if secularity becomes a doctrine in itself, which aims at suppressing or manipulating religion, then it becomes a threat to the democratic ideal. That is exactly what has happened in Turkey, and that’s why we Turks need to re-understand secularity (laiklik, as we call it) in a democratic, not autocratic, way.
Obama’s speech not only included a semantic eye-opener in this respect, it also implied that Turkey’s secular state does not have to clash with, and should not blind us from, the Muslim identity of a large portion of its people. Nine times in his speech he referred to Islam and Muslims. And he sent messages to not only the Turks but also the whole Muslim world: “The United States is not, and will never be”, he said, “at war with Islam.”
There is a reason why he said that not in London or Prague, but in Ankara.
The American president also disagreed with those fear-mongering pundits who constantly pump out the idea that Turkey is “turning its face to the East” under its current government. “I know there are those who like to debate Turkey’s future”, Obama noted. “They wonder whether you will be pulled in one direction or another.” And he explained why they were wrong:
“Here is what they don’t understand: Turkey’s greatness lies in your ability to be at the centre of things. This is not where East and West divide – it is where they come together. In the beauty of your culture. In the richness of your history. In the strength of your democracy.”
Absolutely. The mistake of those “debaters” is to force Turkey to fit into a single identity that they pick and choose. They tend to define it only as a Western ally, a NATO member and a secular republic. This is all true, and very good, but there is more. Turkey is also the heir of the Ottoman Empire, a leading member of the family of predominantly Muslim nations and the testing ground for the synthesis of Islam and democracy. That is what makes her special. That is what gives her a meaning that goes way beyond its borders.
Obviously the American president gets that right. Perhaps it is time for Turks to get it too.
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* Mustafa Akyol is a writer and columnist based in Istanbul. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from the author.
Source: Hürriyet Daily News, 9 April 2009, www.hurriyet.com.tr/english
Copyright permission is granted for publication.