Common Ground Newsbulletin 20-26 October 2009
Dear HumanDHS network friends
Please find below the Common Ground Newsbulletin 20-26 October 2009.
Kind regards
Brian Ward
Common Ground Newsbulletin
Inside this edition 20 - 26 October 2009
Where Egyptian women can go for help
by Sara Khorshid
In this second article in a series exploring the evolving role of ombudsmen as conflict resolvers in changing times, Cairo-based journalist Sara Khorshid praises the gender ombudsman in Egypt and calls for even more “radical solutions” to address women’s issues in the country.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 20 October 2009)
Charter puts a new face on the Golden Rule
by Karen Armstrong and Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“In a world that seems to be spinning out of control”, historian and author Karen Armstrong partners with South African cleric and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu to rally behind a charter that calls for a new world order.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 20 October 2009)
Out of focus in Afghanistan
by Joseph Trevithick
Joseph Trevithick, an analyst for Globalsecurity.org, warns against viewing the security and political situation in Afghanistan through a Western lens.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 20 October 2009)
An Islam at home in Britain
by Asim Siddiqui
Asim Siddiqui, founding trustee of the City Circle and a founding board member of Cedar, examines a recently released Cambridge University report, which aims to provide answers to the question, “What does it mean to live faithfully as a Muslim in Britain today?”
(Source: Common Ground News Service, 20 October 2009)
A third German unification: an interview with Armin Laschet
by Eren Güvercin
In this interview with freelance writer Eren Güvercin, Armin Laschet, Minister for Intergenerational Affairs, Family, Women and Integration in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, calls for a “third German unification”, a shift in Germany’s social paradigm, that provides new Germans with prospects for social mobility.
(Source: Qantara.de, 14 October 2009)
Where Egyptian women can go for help
Sara Khorshid
Cairo - Egypt has a long-standing history of feminism, but gender-related problems in the country are far from resolved. Issues affecting society as a whole, including corruption, poverty and illiteracy, affect women in particular.
Egyptian women suffer in different ways. Marriage is sometimes imposed on extremely poor girls by their fathers so that their “economic burden” might be lifted off families’ shoulders. Discrimination occurs at work, and 83 per cent of Egyptian women report being sexually harassed at some point in their lives, as revealed recently in a study conducted by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights.
In cooperation with the EU, Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) opened an ombudsman’s office in 2002 to receive complaints from women about the problems they are facing and to work toward solving them. The ombudsman acts as a guide who tries to find solutions for women facing discrimination or unfair treatment. The NCW’s establishment of the women’s ombudsman was a positive step that enabled the council to communicate–directly–with ordinary women.
However, the fact that the NCW is a governmental organisation affects its credibility, because the Egyptian government is widely viewed as undemocratic and corrupt. Concerns about the NCW were highlighted in a 2004 Human Rights Watch report: “[T]he autonomy of the NCW, which is presided over by First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, is questionable.… The independence of the NCW and its willingness to publicly criticize laws or policies adverse to women’s rights is also undermined by the fact that it is housed in the ruling National Democratic Party headquarters.”
But the ombudsman is indeed effective, though on a small scale; it works toward solving the problems of thousands of disadvantaged women every year, whereas millions are in need.
Its effectiveness is also limited by an environment characterised by inequality in gender-related laws, corruption and a lack of education about women’s rights across the country.
Yet despite this environment, the ombudsman has gained respect as a player who genuinely listens to women and is committed to addressing their concerns.
The independent Egyptian newspaper Almasry Alyoum reported in April 2008 that the ombudsman received 2,047 complaints over three months, of which 414 were personal status- and family-related, as women wanted to file lawsuits for divorce or demand alimony from their former husbands. Given that many such women cannot afford the expense of a lawsuit, the ombudsman offers considerable help by providing legal assistance through its hundreds of volunteer lawyers across Egypt.
The problem ultimately lies with the Egyptian court system, in which such cases take years to resolve. Human Rights Watch and local attorneys point to the bribery of lower-ranking court officials–usually by the men against whom the lawsuits have been brought–as a key problem that draws out family law cases, which already progress slowly due to the small number of judges.
What these problems require is radical solutions reaching to the roots of the problem: corruption, poverty, illiteracy and a lack of awareness of basic rights.
The ombudsman’s office frequently analyses the grievances it receives and provides recommendations to the NCW’s legislative committee. This committee reaches out to lawmakers and, in some cases, takes part in drafting new laws or amendments.
While this is a step in the right direction, the NCW should go beyond making recommendations to launching far-reaching awareness campaigns that address these root causes that negatively affect both women and men.
Campaigns must be launched to educate women about the laws that affect them so that they can more successfully articulate their rights within their families, their workplaces and their society.
Above all, NCW must dare to vigorously criticise the deep corruption that is embedded in the regime, because its eradication is central to solving gender-related discrimination in Egypt.
Only then will Egypt begin to address abuse against women.
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* Sara Khorshid is a journalist in Cairo. This article is part of a series exploring the evolving role of ombudsmen as conflict resolvers in changing times written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 20 October 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
Charter puts a new face on the Golden Rule
Karen Armstrong and Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Cape Town/London - On 27 September at the Vancouver Peace Summit, amongst some of the world’s most well-known peace-makers–including Nobel Prize winners and internationally-acclaimed authors–we had the opportunity to invite people everywhere to rediscover the Golden Rule.
The Charter of Compassion was composed by leading thinkers from many different faiths. It is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more importantly, compassionate action to the centre of religious, moral and political life. Compassion is the principled determination to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and lies at the heart of all religious and ethical systems.
Why is this so important?
One of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to build a global community where men and women of all races, nations and ideologies can live together in peace. Religion, which should be making a major contribution to this endeavour, is often seen as part of the problem. All too often, the voices of extremism drown out those of kindness, forbearance and mutual respect. Yet the founders of each of the great religious traditions rejected the violence of their time and sought to replace it with an ethic of compassion.
They argued that a truly compassionate ethic, embodied by the Golden Rule, served people’s best interests and made good practical sense. When the Bible commanded that we “love” the foreigner, it was not speaking of emotional tenderness. In Leviticus, love was a legal term: It was used in international treaties, when two kings would promise to give each other practical support, help and loyalty, and look out for each other’s best interests.
In our globalised world, everybody has become our neighbour, and the Golden Rule has become an urgent necessity.
When asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg, Rabbi Hillel, an older contemporary of Jesus, replied: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the Torah–and everything else is only commentary.”
The Dalai Lama put it even more succinctly when he said: “My religion is kindness.”
These traditions have also pointed out that we must not confine our benevolence to those we find congenial or to our own ethnic, national or ideological group. We must have what one of the Chinese sages called jian ai, or concern for everybody. If practiced assiduously–“all day and every day” as Confucius enjoined–we begin to appreciate our profound interdependence and become fully human.
Today, our world has become dangerously polarised and many of our policies–political, economic, financial and environmental–are no longer sustainable. We are all bound together–socially, economically and politically–as never before. Our financial markets are inextricably connected: when one falls, there is a ripple effect worldwide. What happens in Afghanistan or Iraq today may well have repercussions in New York or London tomorrow.
But we have a choice. We can either choose the aggressive and exclusive tendencies that have developed in many religious and secular traditions or we can cultivate those that speak of compassion, empathy, respect and a “concern for everybody”.
The Charter for Compassion will be launched on 12 November. It is not simply a statement of principle; it is above all a summons to creative, practical and sustained action to meet the political, moral, religious, social and cultural problems of our time.
In addition to participating in one of the many launch events, we invite each individual to adopt the charter as their own, to make a lifelong commitment to live with compassion.
We cannot afford to be paralysed by global suffering. We have the power to work together energetically for the wellbeing of humanity, and counter the despairing extremism of our time. Many of us have experienced the power of compassion in our own lives; we know how a single act of kindness and empathy can turn a life around. History also shows that the action of just a few individuals can make a difference.
In a world that seems to be spinning out of control, we need such action now.
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* Karen Armstrong is a former nun turned historian and author, and winner of the TED Prize in 2008 and the 2009 Common Ground Award for Compassion. Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a South African cleric, activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, as well as the 2002 recipient of Search for Common Ground’s Lifetime of Peacebuilding Award. Find out how you and your community can participate in the ongoing effort to build a fair, just and compassionate world at www.charterforcompassion.org . This article first appeared in the Herald Times and was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 20 October 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
Out of focus in Afghanistan
Joseph Trevithick
Washington, DC - One of the most pressing dilemmas facing Afghanistan today is the gap between Afghan and Western views on what constitutes an effective political system and a functional nation-state. For the majority of Afghans, life revolves around their immediate community. Authority is exercised by local leaders not necessarily affiliated with the central government. For Afghans, the existence of a country called the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is largely irrelevant.
The state of Afghan society has proved a challenging obstacle to international efforts in the country. In March 2009, the White House released a “White Paper of the Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan”, the hallmark of what was to be a new and unified policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Less than six months later, the policy is already under review.
Security, however, remains the primary focus. The first recommendation in the March 2009 white paper highlights the importance of “[integrating] population security with building effective local governance and economic development.” This thinking is based on the idea that a government improves its legitimacy and is less likely to suffer from an insurgency if it is better able to provide security to its populace. But this approach assumes that the bulk of that population is unarmed, which is not the case in Afghanistan.
The capacity for self-defence in Afghanistan has historically been required to protect against a wide variety of threats. Each village has an informal means of defending itself. The fact that they are independent of the government leads to the fear that they might side with insurgents.
In addition, for the United States to gain the support of the leadership of each locality would require something tantamount to bribery in the minds of Western powers. In Afghanistan, what might be considered corruption elsewhere is treated as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Operating without patronage is largely unimaginable and even potentially offensive to all those involved.
While it is usually the responsibility of the government to outlaw such practice, the central government historically has had little influence outside of Kabul, the capital. Such factors play a significant role in how the United States can and should engage in Afghanistan. By providing aid and other assistance on a level the average Afghan understands, the United States conveys a level of authority that resonates with them. At present the central government has neither the resources nor the ability to deliver on this scale.
Most lacking in Afghanistan is a sense of national identity, which can help spur these developments. Currently the primary identifier is based on kinship, rather than citizenship.
Despite this, the international community envisages an Afghan state that includes formal government institutions, a broad consensus on gender equality and a secular judiciary. To achieve this would require multiple shifts in the mindset of the population, something that took hundreds of years in Western Europe.
The United States continually hopes that major progress in the development of Afghanistan as a unitary country can and will be achieved peacefully through a Western electoral process that is currently alien to the vast majority of Afghans. This progress should be viewed as a decidedly long-term goal, which international actors can provide assistance for, but which Afghan actors will need to direct.
Based on the current Afghan economic and political environment, a cohesive policy that both the United States and Afghanistan could be content with would involve broad agreements on engagement between the international community and the government in Kabul. To help build a secure Afghanistan, the international community must understand the reality of the Afghan political and economic environment and engage with Kabul to agree upon a common path forward.
The United States should continue to cooperate with Afghanistan to stop terrorism and the narcotics trade, which requires continued support and development for government security forces. For its part, the Afghan government should seek international aid in developing its formal institutions in order to strengthen its role not only in Kabul, but also across the country.
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* Joseph Trevithick works as an analyst for Globalsecurity.org, a defence information website, and holds a M.A. in conflict resolution from Georgetown University. This article first appeared in The Sacramento Bee and was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 20 October 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
An Islam at home in Britain
Asim Siddiqui
London - This month saw the launch of a report authored by a theologically diverse group of leading British Muslims entitled “Contextualising Islam in Britain”. The scholars and practitioners who contributed to the report, published by Cambridge University, sought to answer a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to live faithfully as a Muslim in Britain today?
One problem Muslim groups face when articulating their concerns to a mainly secular audience is that what one side says is not necessarily what the other side hears. Islamic terms such as shariah, jihad, and khilafa often mean very different things to secular Western ears than they may mean to Muslims. So the report argues that, rather than insisting on using Qur’anic terms, English should be used when engaging in public conversations about Islam. Using a “shared moral language”, the report states, will avoid giving the “false impression” that secular and Islamic ethical values are at odds with each other.
While an important point, this should not mean that mainstream Muslims give up on Islamic terminologies and effectively surrender them to extremists–on both sides–who will continue to (mis)use the terms. The report tackles now-contentious terms such as khilafa, which is understood by many as an “Islamic system of government”. The report says the word never meant the establishment of an Islamic state and that the original meaning from classical Islamic theology needs to be reasserted: an ethics based on individual moral responsibility.
But how one is to proactively reclaim the use of Qur’anic terms in the public imagination while only using English is unclear.
The authors of the report also try to explain how Islam can be faithfully understood as compatible with a secular state. It explores the “problematic understanding of divine sovereignty” and suggests that the separation of temporal and spiritual authority may be closer to the Islamic ideal. A number of 20th century proponents of political Islam have argued that God’s sovereignty is manifested through the incorporation of a political framework where a single individual or group claims divine authority to act on God’s behalf, a notion completely incompatible with secular democracy.
The report, however, refers to prominent figures in Islamic history, such as the 8th century Imam Malik ibn Anas and Imam Ahmed ibn Hanbal, both founders of influential schools of thought in Islamic jurisprudence, who believed that the state should not claim divine authority but should be held accountable to universal standards.
In addition to arguing that British Muslims support multicultural secular pluralism because it provides them the freedom to practice their religion, the report tackles hot potato issues such as apostasy and homosexuality in a broad-minded manner. The authors state that while they believe Islam frowns upon such acts, they insist those involved must be respected as equal citizens and treated with dignity.
The report also briefly claims that Muslim radicalisation needs to be better understood. It argues that at its roots violent extremism is a social and political phenomenon, rather than an intrinsically religious one.
The report will be seen as an important step towards a tolerant expression of Islam that has always historically emerged when there has been strong positive engagement between Muslims and non-Muslims, such as in Abbasid Baghdad and Moorish Spain.
With this report, it seems that religious scholars are playing theological catch-up as new and changing contexts emerge, rather than pre-empting change. But, that said, if the panel reflects where mainstream British Muslim thinking is today, then it is more progressive than many Muslims and non-Muslims would have thought. The views reflected in the report are also those that wider non-Muslim civil society and media should note and welcome.
Hardened religious conservatives may cry capitulation and cite as evidence the fact that the government funded the research. However, the authors come from theologically diverse and respected backgrounds. The success of this report will be measured in the longer term in its trickle down effect in influencing the ideas of younger Muslim activists and narrowing the gaps in misunderstanding with wider society.
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* Asim Siddiqui is a founding trustee of the City Circle, a network of young British Muslim professionals, and a founding board member of Cedar, a pan-European Muslim professional network. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 20 October 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
A third German unification: an interview with Armin Laschet
Eren Güvercin
Bonn, Germany - Armin Laschet, Minister for Intergenerational Affairs, Family, Women and Integration in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, discussed the transformation of the migration model of society and the continued lack of advancement opportunities for immigrants in Germany with freelance writer Eren Güvercin.
In your book, Die Aufsteigerrepublik (The Republic of the Upwardly Mobile), you formulate a vision for a future Germany in which the social and ethnic background of a person plays no decisive role in their social advancement. The reality today is quite different.
Armin Laschet: Yes, it is different because we haven’t focused on this issue until now. It was generally thought that we weren’t an immigration country and therefore there was no need to provide systematic support. And those individuals that did succeed usually did so by chance.
I write in my book about journalist and author Hatice Akyün, who has Turkish roots. She began to read because a library bus regularly stopped on her street. In other cases, it was the help of a teacher, an especially committed parent or neighbours that helped with the homework. This support, however, must be systematised and must become the task of the state. The reality today is not what I would hope for.
In recent years, there has been a tendency among Turkish university graduates, after completing their degree in Germany, to leave for Turkey where they hope to find better career prospects. What should the state do in order to prevent the departure of well-educated specialists? After all, they offer valuable potential as most of them were born in Germany.
Laschet: No one really knows how large their number is. Nonetheless, since 2008, we have become an emigration country. More young people are leaving than immigrants are arriving, so we have to attract every single newcomer. We have to show that there are worthwhile prospects and give young people with immigrant backgrounds the feeling that they will have the same opportunities with their qualifications in Germany as someone with the name of Schmidt or Müller. This still isn’t the case everywhere in Germany.
I believe that if we highlight the success stories that already exist, then a mood will develop in which people will say, “I’m staying here. This is where I was born and it really is my country.”
You write that Germany still hasn’t experienced domestic unification and that what we need is a “third German unification”. How is this supposed to overcome social barriers? A certain degree of scepticism with respect to Muslims is widespread in this society.
Laschet: To begin with, I’d say that it isn’t only a Muslim issue. It is not a religious, but rather a social issue. It’s about who has the opportunity to move up in society and who doesn’t. That Germany has to learn to get along with different cultures and religions is just one side of things. This is why we have the German Islam Conference [an organisation that aims to be the umbrella organisation for all Muslims in the country] and a great deal of dialogue is now taking place.
This is just part of the picture. The other part has to do with social advancement–it is what I refer to as the “third German unification.”
The first German unification was the integration of 12 million displaced persons after World War II. At the time, it was a difficult process. A Catholic coming to a Protestant village was often made to feel excluded and was given few opportunities. Mixed marriages were forbidden or, before the Second Vatican Council, not permitted for practicing Catholics. A lot has changed since then.
The second unification was between East and West Germany. At the time of re-unification, many immigrants noticed that they were pushed to the back of the line. Although they had been living in the West far longer than the East Germans, they felt that they had lost their position.
As such, I believe that now is the time to work towards a third unification. We have to do everything to provide new Germans with the optimum support and prospects for social mobility.
You are Germany’s first Minister for Integration as well as being a politician within the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) political party. You have correctly said that we require the same opportunities for citizens with immigrant backgrounds. That sounds well and good, but why isn’t there a single CDU member of parliament with an immigrant background?
Laschet: A very good question, indeed! This is a problem that has arisen over many years. There aren’t very many party members with immigrant backgrounds. Only recently have they started to join the party. And, of course, we have the German-Turkish Forum and other activities, but this is just a beginning. It all has to grow.
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* Eren Güvercin is a freelance writer. Armin Laschet is the Minister for Intergenerational Affairs, Family, Women and Integration in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. This abridged article, translated from German, is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from Qantara.de. The full text can be found at www.qantara.de .
Source: Qantara.de, 14 October 2009, www.qantara.de
Copyright permission is granted for publication.