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Dave Schechter’s Opinion on Interfaith Dialogue

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from CNN

I’ve thought for some time that if more Americans had personal contact, even friendships, with their fellow Americans who are Muslims there might be less mistrust and misunderstanding about the role Islam plays in their lives.

The years have convinced me that interfaith dialogue, particularly the one-on-one variety, is a more viable way to break down barriers between people than large-scale efforts.

Now, before we go any further: Yes, within a worldwide population of more than 1 billion Muslims (which include a few million in the United States) there are those who, for a variety of reasons, hate the United States, would do it harm or support such action.

But when the subject comes up, the American Muslims I’ve met – whether they were born here, emigrated from traditionally Muslim nations or converted from other faiths – remark how America, even amid the tensions of recent years, affords them the freedom to live, work, study and raise their children, as their neighbors do, and, importantly, worship in the way they choose, as their neighbors do.

Young people tend to be less-jaded and, as such, more open to getting to know “the other.”

As an example, I’ll point to our daughter (we’ll call her “M”), who recently made a trip home from college and brought along a friend (we’ll call her “A”).

“M” is proud of her Jewish heritage. “A” is equally proud of being Muslim; so much so that she wears a hijab. They make quite a pair and not just because they have a similar sense of humor.

Their friendship started when “M” and “A” were paired up for a project in their mass communications class at a small state university in the South. On their way to the library, “A” asked if “M” would have a problem working with her because, well, she’s Muslim.

We, “M’s” parents, figured she laughed and said something like, “Let me tell you, . . .”

There was the trip to Spain and Morocco that M and her mother took as part of a delegation of Christians, Muslims and Jews, which included visits to mosques in both countries. There was the visit to the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine that her parents subjected her and her siblings to while on vacation. There are her mother’s myriad interfaith activities, ranging from her work at a 24-hour faith-based cable television channel to a Jewish-Muslim women’s baking group.

That initial conversation lasted some two hours.

The two young women must have made quite a sight when they attended the Jewish festival in the city where they go to school. “M” wore a t-shirt that read “Shabbat. Just Do It” with the swoosh logo. “A” wore, well, her hijab. There were stares, but these young women did not care.

The point is that, as friends, they talk about each other’s religion and respect the role it plays in each other’s life.

“M” once declared interfaith activity to be her mother’s domain. Now we, her parents, chuckle at that memory and take pride in having a daughter who looks past stereotypes. When you get to know the “other” it becomes harder to accept generalizations and easier to look at the individual.

I hesitate to conclude with a comment by the President of the United States, knowing how his own religious heritage has at times been a point of controversy, but in India recently President Obama made the following relevant comment in a speech to college students:

“Whatever may be your religion we can treat each other with respect as per some of the universal principles. Young people like you can make a huge impact in reaffirming that you can be a strong observer of your faith without putting somebody else down. How you respond to each other is probably as important as any speech a president makes. It’s necessary in a world that’s getting smaller, where more and more people of different backgrounds, race and ethnicities are interacting, innovating and working.”

The original article can be found here: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/27/my-take-how-real-interfaith-dialogue-works/

Conflicts Among the Different Kinds of Islam in Pakistan

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from the New York Times; by HUMA IMTIAZ AND CHARLOTTE BUCHEN
KASUR, Pakistan — In Pakistan’s heartland, holy men with bells tied to their feet close their eyes and sway to the music. Nearby, rose petals are tossed on tombstones. Free food is distributed to devotees.

This peaceful tableau is part of Sufism, Pakistan’s most popular brand of Islam, which attracts millions of worshipers at about a dozen major festivals throughout the year. Each day, thousands visit shrines dedicated to Sufi saints.

But the rituals came under heavy attack in 2010, as minority hard-line militants took responsibility for five shrine attacks that killed 64 people — a marked increased compared with 2005 to 2009, when nine attacks killed 81 people.

Attacks in previous years occurred in the middle of the night or when worshipers were not present, apparently in an effort to avoid casualties. But in 2010, terrorists carried out suicide bombings when thousands of worshipers were present, and in the nation’s largest cities, like Karachi and Lahore.

The increase in attacks, and a direct effort to kill those who practice a more mystical brand of Islam, has torn the fabric of mainstream worship in Pakistan. But as worshipers continue to visit the Sufi shrines and many Sufi festivals continue in the face of threats, it also evidences the perseverance of Pakistan’s more moderate brand of Islam.

“It’s a very disturbing picture that militants have extended their targets to shrines, which are symbols of popular Islam in Pakistan and are widely visited,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a professor of political science at Lahore University of Management Sciences. “However, I don’t think the militants are succeeding – thousands of people still visit the shrines despite these attacks.”

Although there is no official data, the number of people who informally follow Sufi traditions is believed to be in the millions. They have long been condemned as un-Islamic by fundamentalist groups because they worship saints and perform music and dance.

The United States, meanwhile, sees Sufi Islam as a counter force to terrorism, and has helped promote it by giving more than $1.5 million since 2001 on the restoration and conservation of Sufi shrines in Pakistan.

Amir Rana, the director of the Pak Institute for  Peace Studies, a think tank that analyzes religious conflict, said there were  several reasons for the recent spike in attacks on Sufi shrines.

Groups within Al Qaeda, which have increased their strategic operations in Pakistan since 2007, have expanded their ideological war on the sectarian divide.

Mr. Rana also said militants suddenly changed their strategy in 2009, when they started soft targets, or popular and less secure venues, such as the Meena Bazaar in Peshawar, as a way to retain their radical sympathizers.

Other experts say that fragmented militant groups in Pakistan have fully spun out control, and the shrine attacks fit a larger pattern that finds extremist groups who in the past have focused on Kashmir and Afghanistan now turning inward to assert their power and ideology within Pakistan’s borders.

“Militancy keeps on demanding sacrifices,” Ayesha Siddiqa, a security analyst who says she is a descendant of a Sufi saint, said. “So if it’s not targeting the enemy outside, it’s targeting the enemy within.”

In the eyes of some extremists, Sufi loyalists can be viewed as cohorts of the Pakistani government. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi both carry saint-like status because they are from prominent Sufi families that have been caretakers for shrines synonymous with the ruling elite. In turn, those in power often use such devoted followings as a tool for recruiting voters.

Pir Tayyab, a hard-line Deobandi cleric who has been associated with militant organizations, including the Pakistani Taliban, said that while it was acceptable to pray for a saint’s soul at a shrine, it is forbidden to search for God’s qualities in a saint.

“The singing and dancing that takes place at shrines is disrespectful,” he said. However, he said, bombing a shrine is also unacceptable. “It is not correct to disrespect a grave or to remove someone from his grave.”

While provincial governments have scaled back some musical performances in response to threats, the large gatherings persist, drawing big and determined crowds at major shrines on a near weekly basis.

The only major cancellation over security fears was made by the Sindh provincial government, which canceled musical performances that were a permanent feature of Karachi’s festivals.

Prodded by protests that demanded more security, the government of Punjab, which oversees more than 500 shrines, is spending $400,000 on increased security at 15 of its major shrines this year, including the installation of cameras, security gates and metal detectors. At some shrines, officials said donors had paid for new security installations.

But security is rarely a deterrent to attacks. The Pakistani Taliban remains unfazed by the government’s efforts to safeguard the shrines. The government installed two security gates in 2008 at Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s shrine, the most famous shrine in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. But in October 2010, two suicide bombers detonated explosives there, killing 9 and injuring 75. Since the blasts, and just before an annual Sufi celebration, the government installed 18 security cameras at the shrine.

The Original Article can be found here: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/the-islam-that-hard-liners-hate/?ref=world

Affirmative Action in the University of Cape Town, South Africa

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from the New York Times, by: Celia W. Dugger
CAPE TOWN — The University of Cape Town was once a citadel of white privilege on the majestic slopes of Devil’s Peak. At the height of apartheid, it admitted few black or mixed-race students, and they were barred from campus dormitories, even forbidden to attend medical school postmortems on white corpses.

South Africa’s finest university is now resplendently multiracial. But it is also engaged in a searching debate about just how far affirmative action should go to heal the wounds of an oppressive history, echoing similar conflicts in the United States, where half a dozen states have banned the use of racial preferences in admissions to public universities.

“Are we here because we’re black or are we here because we’re intelligent?” asked Sam Mgobozi, 19, a middle-class black student who attended a first-rate high school in Durban and finds affirmative action offensive, even as he concedes that poor black applicants may still need it.

The University of Cape Town was supposed to have settled this debate last year when its professors — 70 percent of them white men — supported a policythat gave admissions preferences based on apartheid racial categories to black, mixed-race and Indian students.

Instead, unease with the current approach has spilled out over the past year in fierce exchanges on newspaper editorial pages and formal debating platforms. Sixteen years after the political ascent of the black majority, the university’s dilemma resonates across a society conflicted about how best to achieve racial redress, whether in corporate board rooms or classrooms.

Prof. Neville Alexander, a Marxist sociologist who was classified as mixed race under apartheid, has roused the campus debate with the charge that affirmative action betrays the ideals of nonracialism that so many fought and died for during the long struggle against apartheid. Professor Alexander, who spent a decade imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, insists that the University of Cape Town, which is public, must resist pressure from the government to use racial benchmarks in determining how well the university is performing. “The government under apartheid did the same and we told them to go to hell,” he said in one standing-room-only campus debate.

Affirmative action’s champion on campus is Max Price, the vice chancellor, who was himself detained as an anti-apartheid student activist in the mid-1970s. Dr. Price, who grew up as a child of white privilege, contends that preferences based on apartheid’s racial classifications provide a means to help those harmed by that system to gain critical educational opportunities.

The university has an openly stated policy of admitting blacks who have substantially lower test scores than whites, but whites still outnumber blacks almost two to one — 45 percent versus 25 percent — among the 20,500 South African students at the university. In South Africa, 79 percent of the population is black and only 9 percent is white.

And even with extensive programs of compensatory instruction on campus to help disadvantaged students, just over half of the black students graduated in five years in recent years, while four out of five whites completed their educations in that time, university statistics show. “We’re getting the best here and the best is struggling,” said a deputy vice chancellor, Crain Soudien.

The situation is even bleaker in higher education across the country. In engineering, law, the sciences and business management, only about a third or fewer of black students manage to get a degree in five years, researchers have found. The country’s efforts to produce black professionals remain crippled by failing public high schools in impoverished rural areas and black townships that the post-apartheid government has proved unable to fix.

Social class is another complicating factor. There are wide disparities in income between white and black South Africans, but also among blacks. The job market rewards graduates of top universities — black and white — while punishing the ill-educated, who are overwhelmingly black.

Students and professors here ask whether children of the emerging black middle and upper classes should continue to get the same break on admissions as impoverished black students. The university is developing nonracial measures of disadvantage — for example, whether applicants’ parents went to a university, or the quality of the high schools the students themselves attended.

But the university now only has enough staff to base its admissions decisions for most students on their scores on a national subject-based examination for high school seniors and their apartheid racial classifications.

Link to the article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/world/africa/23safrica.html?pagewanted=1&ref=africa

Iraqi Christians Hiding During Christmas

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from the New York Times, by: John Leland
BAGHDAD — As they gathered to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the congregation here first contemplated death, represented by a spare Christmas tree decked with paper stars, each bearing a photograph of a member of a nearby church killed in a siege by Islamic militants in October.

The congregants on Friday night were fewer than 100, in a sanctuary built for four or five times as many. But they were determined. This year, even more than in the past, Iraqi’s dwindling Christian minority had reasons to stay home for Christmas.

“Yes, we are threatened, but we will not stop praying,” the Rev. Meyassr al-Qaspotros told the Christmas Eve crowd at the Sacred Church of Jesus, a Chaldean Catholic church. “We do not want to leave the country because we will leave an empty space.”

He added: “Be careful not to hate the ones killing us because they know not what they are doing. God forgive them.”

Throughout Iraq, churches canceled or toned down Christmas observances this year, both in response to threats of violence and in honor of the nearly 60 Christians killed in October, when militants stormed a Syrian Catholic church and blew themselves up. Since the massacre, more than a thousand Christian families have fled Baghdad for the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, with others going to Jordan or Syria or Turkey. Though the exact size of Iraq’s Christian population is unclear, by some estimates it has fallen to about 500,000 from a high of 1.4 million before the American-led invasion of 2003. Iraq’s total population is about 30 million. This week, a new threat appeared on a Web site that said it represented the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant group that claimed responsibility for the October church siege. The Web site referred to a church in Egypt that it said was holding two women because they had converted to Islam, and vowed more carnage. “We swear to God, if there are only two of us left,” the text read, “one of the two will keep fighting you.”

Churches in Kirkuk, Mosul and Basra canceled or curtailed services for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and warned congregations not to hold parties or mount displays. In Baghdad, decorations were seen in stores, but many churches scaled back or held only prayer sessions.

While Our Lady of Salvation, the church attacked in October, was among those that canceled services for Christmas Eve, it planned to hold services on Saturday. The Epiphany Dominican Convent canceled midnight Mass and then early Mass on Christmas morning so worshipers could avoid risky travel at vulnerable times. During the week, the church moved one Mass to a nuns’ convent, so the nuns would not have to travel in religious dress.

“People are lost,” said the Rev. Rami Simon, one of five brothers at the convent. “They don’t know where they live now. Is this Iraq?”

For those who dare to attend services, he said: “I say, you must accept to live like the first Christians. They celebrated in a cave and no one knew about it. So we are not the first to live it.”

But he added: “If I wasn’t a priest I would not stay one minute in Iraq. As a priest I find myself a missionary in my country. And some stay because we are here.”

At the Sacred Church of Jesus, attendance has dropped by half since October, Father Qaspotros said. When people tell him they are afraid to come to church, he said: “I tell them, You are not supposed to be afraid. You are supposed to connect with God, and death is not the last step. If we die, we survive for God.”

For Faez Shakur, 25, who attended Father Qaspotros’s service on Christmas Eve, this was the message he took away. “Whenever there is disaster,” he said, “it means a new day, a new life.” When he saw the tree decorated with the faces of the dead, he cried, he said. But he was where he belonged, he said. “We don’t have anything else,” he said, “just to pray and continue.”

Original article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/world/middleeast/25iraq.html?_r=1&ref=world

The Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

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From the New York Times, by: Sheryl Gay Stolberg
WASHINGTON — The military’s longstanding ban on service by gays and lesbians came to a historic and symbolic end on Wednesday, as President Obama signed legislation repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the contentious 17-year old Clinton-era law that sought to allow gays to serve under the terms of an uneasy compromise that required them to keep their sexuality a secret.

“No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie or look over their shoulder,” Mr. Obama said during a signing ceremony in a packed auditorium at the Interior Department here. Quoting the chairman of his joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, Mr. Obama went on, “Our people sacrifice a lot for their country, including their lives. None of them should have to sacrifice their integrity as well.”

The repeal does not immediately put a stop to “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Mr. Obama must still certify that changing the law to allow homosexual and bisexual men and women to serve openly in all branches of the military will not harm readiness, as must Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mullen, before the military can implement the new law. But the secretary and the admiral have backed Mr. Obama, who said ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” was a topic of his first meeting with the men. He praised Mr. Gates for his courage; Admiral Mullen, who was on stage with the president during the signing ceremony here, received a standing ovation.

While there is still significant resistance within the military to the change in policy, especially within the Marine Corps, at least one proponent — Representative Barney Frank, the openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts — insisted on Wednesday that this latest effort to integrate the armed services will go more smoothly than did racial or gender integration.

“Reality will very soon make it clear that there is nothing to worry about,” Mr. Frank said. He called the signing the biggest civil rights moment in the nation since the signing of voting rights legislation in the 1960s. “If you can fight for your country, you can do anything,” he said.

In the years since President Bill Clinton first enacted “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 1993, some 17,000 service members have been discharged under the policy. While many gay people in the military are now breathing a sigh of relief, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which represents soldiers facing charges under the policy, is warning its members that they are “still at risk” because the repeal will not take full effect until 60 days after Mr. Obama, the defense secretary and admiral certify readiness.

“The bottom line is DADT is still in effect and it is not safe to come out,” the organization said.

For Mr. Obama, the ceremony — held at the Interior Department because the White House is tied up with holiday tours — marked yet another in a string of last-minute, bipartisan legislative triumphs, a surprising turnaround in the wake of the self-described “shellacking” his party took at the polls last month. He had already signed a bipartisan tax deal into law, and the Senate appears headed on Wednesday to approve a new nuclear arms pact with Russia, which will give him a significant foreign policy victory as he wraps up the first half of his term. He looked relaxed and upbeat as he soaked up the energy from an enthusiastic crowd.For the gay rights movement, which has been frustrated with the pace of progress under Mr. Obama, Wednesday marked a celebratory turning point. “Thank you, Mr. President,” someone shouted, as Mr. Obama took the stage, prompting a round of other shouts: “Chicago’s in the house, Mr. President! You rock, Mr. President!” Mr. Obama pronounced himself overwhelmed.

The audience for the ceremony included a who’s who of gay activists, among them Frank Kameny, who was fired from a civilian job as an Army astronomer in 1957 — an act that prompted him to found a gay rights advocacy organization in Washington D.C. and to file a lawsuit which went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1965 he picketed the White House, in the first ever demonstration there by gays.

Now white-haired at 85, Mr. Kameny also served as an enlisted Army soldier; he signed up in May 1943, he said, three days before he turned 18, and saw “front line combat” in Germany during World War II. He said he was asked if he had “homosexual tendencies” and denied it. “They asked, and I didn’t tell,” he said, “and I resented for 67 years that I had to lie.”

Link to the article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/us/politics/23military.html?ref=politics