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Voice across the divide

April 2, 2004

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A voice of understanding and unity, American Islamic leader Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.
Photo: Mario Borg

An American imam is helping bridge the cultural and religious gulf between the West and Islam. Barney Zwartz reports.

Meet the man in the middle of the clash of civilisations: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. An American Islamic leader and co-founder of the ambitious Cordoba Initiative, his task is to interpret Islam to the West and the West to the Islamic world.

An Egyptian American, educated in England, Egypt and Malaysia, including a PhD in physics, Feisal is imam of a leading New York mosque, a Sufi master and descendant of a long line of Islamic scholars. For him, "we" is an ambiguous term, sometimes denoting Muslims and sometimes Americans, in a subtle slalom of which he is hardly aware.

Feisal is an advocate of interfaith dialogue, but he wants it to go deeper than Christians, Jews and Muslims getting together to eat Turkish food or gefilte fish.

"That's the first step, but what do you do for an encore?" he asks. "How do we build coalitions across the religious divide? What platforms can we agree upon, and how can we provide them to our political leaders to act on?"

The Cordoba Initiative, a mere 18 months old, is producing plenty of ideas. Named for the golden age (800 to 1200CE) of Islam in Spain, to which many Christians and Jews fled oppressive European regimes, it is behind a range of programs to promote understanding through dialogue, education and robust communication.

For example, it is bringing American Jewish and Muslim leaders together to discuss Israel-Palestine. This month Feisal speaks to Jewish leaders about anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. Projects range from bringing children of the three Abrahamic faiths together for a ceremonial meal to carefully targeted research by top-level universities and think tanks.

It has to involve many hundreds of scholars, he says, and influence institutions such as the United Nations and World Bank, which play a key role in making or breaking economies in many parts of the world.

Feisal, who has just spent a couple of weeks in Melbourne and Sydney trying to deepen interfaith efforts, believes American Muslims can play a fruitful role in reducing tension and influencing Muslim countries.

The Muslim world has a great interest in Western Muslims, he says. "But they are still finding their Western legs - institutionally and in many other respects - and the American Muslim community is still trying to develop an American Islamic identity.

"But this influence will happen because it happened before. American Protestants created a healthy separation between church and state, and exported its ideas of pluralism to Europe. The American Catholic community was instrumental in reshaping the character of global Catholicism - American bishops helped bring Vatican II. American Judaism was instrumental in reshaping global Jewry. The American religious voice has had a profound influence in countries of origin."

Feisal concedes it is a tough task. In his latest book, What's Right With Islam, due out this month, he writes that polarisation between the US and the Muslim world is probably as bad as it has ever been. But all is not lost, though both sides have much work to do.

"The West has to understand what the Islamic ethic is based on, what its impulse is. It is a statement of the Abrahamic ethic, embodied in the two fundamental commands that Moses and Jesus spoke about, to love the Lord with heart, mind, body and soul, and to love fellow human beings as you love yourself," he says. "In the book I show that this is the American religious ethic, the umbrella ethic that underlies all expressions of religion, and how that is similar to Western notions of pluralism and democracy."

The West also needs to understand the effect on the Muslim world of its policies over the past century, including the vestiges of colonialism and racism. For example, both the US and the Soviet Union promoted authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world as proxies in the Cold War.

"Understanding the aetiology is the prerequisite to developing strategic answers. That includes the need to democratise these nations.

"But democracy has to be translated into an Islamic vernacular - it can't just be a planting down of the American franchise."

The West also needs to help develop economic systems. "At the end - no, at the beginning - of the day, what people want more than anything else is economic freedom. What is fuelling resentment in the Islamic world is the increasing numbers of young, educated Muslims who are either unemployed or under-employed."

The Muslim side must address their economic infrastructure, especially the issue of usury (defined as any interest on a loan, which Islam forbids).

Feisal says the West leapt ahead through allowing interest, which led to the development of banking and the availability of capital, and through the idea of the limited liability corporation. This allowed the rise of companies that could develop huge amounts of capital, such as the East India Company or the Hudson Bay Company. But the Muslim word is still grappling with the concept of interest.

Another path is education. The West joined with the Pakistanis and Saudis to create a form of education to serve the Cold War calculus, he says.

"So the madrassas they developed in Pakistan created a certain kind of militant Muslim citizen for the specific purpose of fighting the Soviets. Therefore we have a moral duty to another joint venture - to encourage a generation of Muslim citizens that see and understand Islam as a pluralistic faith."

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told him recently he could open 500 madrassas tomorrow (to teach a more moderate form of Islam). "But where is the money to come from?"

Another area of mutual misunderstanding, according to Feisal, is the separation of church and state. He tries to explain this to both sides in a way that lets them not only comprehend the differences of perception but overcome them.

The notion arose in the West from the cleavage between science and religion, which Islam did not experience. In the American Constitution, the separation aims to prevent the government preferring one church or interpretation.

"It was not intended to make America an atheistic society. But in the 20th-century rise of secularism, religion was viewed as something passive and regressive. There is a sense in the Muslim world, therefore, that the separation of church and state is an anti-religion stance, intended to reject religion from the public debate about how to build a good society. But the values of religion need to be in the political and economic boardroom, they cannot be ejected from the debate."


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