Transcript - From Turmoil to Tourism

FROM TURMOIL TO TOURISM

NARRATOR: Embedded in the conflicting cultures of the Middle East, is the common genesis of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, not in the form of a deity but of one man, a common spiritual ancestor to over three billion people on the planet – Abraham or Ibrahim.

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: The Abrahamic ethic is one which fundamentally posits the idea that all human beings are equal.

NARRATOR: Today on A World of Possibilities: From Turmoil to Tourism, following the Path of Abraham. Abraham’s life was defined by pilgrimage. Recall that it was Abraham who left a settled life and family behind, to become a sojourner and seeker who walked his way across vast stretches of desert. Inspired by his example, a modern day initiative seeks to reopen the path of Abraham as a tangible, symbolic and non-sectarian expression of unity across the religious and political boundaries that divide the Middle East. Why? To create thousands of person-to-person encounters, each inspiring curiosity and respect between individuals, cultures, nations and religions.

WILLIAM URY: This idea of Abraham path initiative is a side-by-side approach, very different from face to face; walking together in common respect of the person who is the common ancestor of all three faiths – Abraham.

NARRATOR: If people follow the path of Abraham across the desert wilderness of their differences, will it finally bring us closer to the oasis of common understanding and appreciation for one another? What will trekkers feel and find as they cross the land of Abraham, through great ancient cities like Jerusalem, Aleppo and Damascus?

PAOLO DALL’OGLIO: In the old Damascus, Jewish and Shi-ite, Muslim and Sunni, Muslim and Christians living together peacefully.

TOVA HARTMAN HALBERTAL: I think we need to accept Abrahamic path, literally walk together the walk, crucial component of how we ever hope to get beyond the mere struggle for survival.

AMIR MAHALLATI: We have to depoliticize religion.

NARRATOR: I’m Mark Sommer. Join us for a walk in the footsteps of Abraham. Welcome to A World of Possibilities. The Lord said to Abraham; go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and you shall be a blessing and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you. And so according to religious doctrine, Abraham set off, traversing a path across the Middle East, beginning in the center of the ancient city of Haram in Southeastern Turkey, winding through modern day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Palestine. Who was this traveler, this man revered as the father and spiritual ancestor to three great religious traditions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam? And what if anything does the story of Abraham mean for our world today? The Abraham Path Initiative is an endeavor of the global Negotiation Project at Harvard University in concert with many organizations and individuals from the Middle East and elsewhere. Its aim is to establish a secure walking path in the footsteps of the prophet, where people from all walks of life, from the casual backpacker to the priest, rabbi or imam, can walk together in mutual respect. There are also many tangible benefits to the opening of the Abraham Path for the countries and local communities along the route: the creation of jobs, the development of sustainable tourism, the restoration of cultural and religious sites and non-political cross border collaborations. William Ury, visionary founder of the initiative

is a renowned international negotiator who directs Harvard’s global negotiation project. Co author of the classic negotiation manual, Getting to Yes, he’s worked with former president Jimmy Carter and other statesmen on back channel negotiations to bring peace and reconciliation to Northern Ireland, South Africa, Venezuela and many other regions of the world. To explain the genesis of the initiative, William Ury joins us now from the studios of public radio station KGNU in Boulder Colorado.

WILLIAM URY: You know, I started my career in or after conflict, working in the Middle East back in the70’s. I always felt like there were enough people working in that field, working in that particular conference so I worked on other conflicts. When I come back to it and that conflict has been so heavily dealt with that for me it calls for a new approach. And the approach that we’ve traditionally taken – which is a very important approach not to be discounted – is a face-to-face approach, you bring people face to face with each other and you try to engage them in dialog. And this idea of the Abraham Path Initiative is a side-by side approach, very different from face to face. There are a lot of people who will not come face to face, whose opinions, whose beliefs are so strong, particularly when it comes to issues of faith and identity, that they’re not comfortable actually sitting in the same room with each other, and if they do they just exchange platitudes. And so maybe there’s a possibility of actually engaging them in a side-by-side activity, which is actually walking. Walking together, side by side or alongside each other, in common respect of the person who actually is the common ancestor of all three faiths: Abraham.

NARRATOR: Now are you saying that the very physical act of moving shoulder to shoulder side by side has a kind of effect on the way people relate to one another that’s very different from face to face?

WILLIAM URY: Conversations are different when you’re sitting across the table from someone than if you’re going out for a walk, particularly in a beautiful setting. There’s a kind of a quality of side-by-side activity that is more inclusive, that is more casual, is more informal, is less tense. The Abraham Path initiative is a side-by-side activity. I have this feeling and this faith that it will slowly slowly create a space for thousands of conversations that will have all kinds of unexpected turns, that will hold the possibility of creating a new environment that holds the possibility of mutual respect and coexistence based on peace and justice.

NARRATOR: You’ve chosen to form this around Abraham, and around Abraham’s pilgrimage or path.

WILLIAM URY: You know, there’s an old saying that some conflicts are so difficult that they can only be healed by a story. Abraham is someone who comes before Judaism, before Christianity, before Islam. He’s not considered a god or a near god. He’s a human being with his strengths and his weaknesses. And he has one idea in mind which is that there is, everything is one, you know, that there is one God, he’s known as kind of the father of monotheism. And he stands for respect. Respect not only for divinity but respect for all. He still symbolizes in the Middle East today the spirit of hospitality. His tent was always open in all four directions. And a lot of people actually will walk this path, they may not even have a feeling for Abraham, although most people do, I’ve found. He’s really at the heart of Islam. He’s at the heart of Judaism. He’s at the heart of many aspects of Christianity. Once you established a trail or a path, people walk it, they’ll take camels, they’ll take donkeys, they’ll take buses, they’ll do parts of it, they’ll do all of it. But it becomes a focal point for interaction, for large-scale interaction across boundaries, across national boundaries, across religious boundaries, across the boundaries between those who are believers and those who are secular. The central purpose of this initiative is to inspire respect, respect for the other human being, respect for the land, respect for the culture, respect for divinity and so on.

NARRATOR: What is the nature of the path?

WILLIAM URY: What we have to go from is the old narratives that are captured in the Book of Genesis and the Koran and a lot of legends. He is believed to have started from a place called Ur, which is in southern Iraq. Many people also believe that he came from the city of Urfa, which is actually in southeastern Turkey, where there is actually a cave where he’s believed to have been born and there’s a

whole mosque there. And then he’s believed to have gone up the Euphrates to the city of Haran, which is now in southeastern Turkey, we’re talking about Mesopotamia, and it’s there in the city of Haran that he heard the call, you know the call to leave his life behind, everything that he had known to trust in the word and his inner voice and the word of God and go off into the desert, and thus be kind of a blessing to all the families on earth, that’s the promise that he received in his conversations with God. And so he then sets off in the desert for the Promised Land. He finds his way down through Syria and Lebanon down into what is now Israel and Palestine. He goes to Jerusalem. It’s in Jerusalem that he offers up his son for sacrifice, which is why Jerusalem is such a holy place, because that’s on the Temple Mount. He is buried in Hebron. He’s also believed by Muslims at least, to have gone to Mecca, where he’s believed to have built or rebuilt the Kabah, which is the holiest site in Mecca. So if you actually retrace his route, his journey actually binds together what we know as the Middle East.

NARRATOR: How does it link up, if at all, with the political conflicts and issues of this entire region?

WILLIAM URY: Well indirectly it does. This path is not meant to be a political statement. The initiative is not a political initiative, the idea is really to create an opportunity for large scale people to people exchanges, as well as economic interactions, that will create an environment, we hope that over time will have positive political effects, which interest obviously the politics cannot be ignored in the region. At the same time, this is not a peace walk. Basically, we’re just creating a safe walking trail for anyone who wants to come for any reason, and in the end the process itself of creating a path across six nations here, across all those borders, will mean that countries will need to interact with each other, they’ll see the benefit of interacting with each other.

NARRATOR: And I notice that the Dalai Lama was one of the early people to endorse this idea, and he is of course a Buddhist, so this is not just a path for members of the three faiths.

WILLIAM URY: That’s right. To me the potential of it is at once the path starts to gain momentum, it will go on for generations and for centuries and who knows what the potential is as people walk together you know, this conflict is an ancient conflict, an old conflict, and it may well take some generations to really fully transform it, and the path ahs that capacity to be along there, to be that forum for those conversations that might genuinely transform the icon of impossible conflict in the world today which is the Middle East.

NARRATOR: William Ury, founder of the Abraham Path Initiative and director of Harvard’s Global negotiations Project. After a short break, we journey to a monastery on the edge of the desert, an hour from Damascus, to meet Father Paolo Dall O’glio.

You’re listening to A World of Possibilities, a production of the Mainstream Media Project. To hear the podcast of this program and to access our show archives, please visit our website ataworldofpossibilities.com or visit iTunes.

NARRATOR: Syria borders Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, Israel to the southwest and Lebanon to the west. At the edge of the Syrian Desert north of Damascus, lies the sixth century monastery of Deir Marmusa. The path of Abraham passes this way, and it’s here that we meet Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, the monastery’s spiritual leader. Father Paolo is a native Italian who migrated to the Syrian Desert as a young man, and directed its restoration from ancient ruins. For 22 years, this Jesuit priest has facilitated dialog and catalyzed understanding between Christians and Muslims. He says Mass in Arabic, the monks study the Koran and the monastery holds interfaith gatherings. Father Paolo

Dall‘Oglio speaks to us by phone from the monastery. You’ll have to listen closely, because the phone to Deir Marmusa is a little blurred.

PAOLO DALL’OGLIO: The beginning of my story is quite practical. I’m a disciple of Jesus, I’m a fisher and I wish to serve the gospel and human beings all over the world, and was ready to go wherever. I felt very much in the ’76 that one of the next big issues for humanity would be the relationship between the church and Islam. So that’s why I asked my superiors in that time to come and study Arabic, the liturgical language of Islam all over the world, and I came to study Arabic and to really try to put my roots as much as possible in this context, and the symbol of the monastery, Christian monastery on the edge of the desert is the symbol that is recognized by Christians and Muslims as well. For Muslims from the time of the prophet in the Koran itself, the monastery’s monks are a symbol, a positive symbol of devotion. And first most of them had visited the monastery and somehow we can say that today, a Christian monastery of this time is part of the symbolic world of Islam. So we have a very good mood or relationship with a lot of Muslims and a feeling that together we create a dynamic of understanding and love.

NARRATOR: In the United States under the Bush administration Syria has been called a terrorist state, and the impression is that it is politically a very radical and polarized society. You seem to be saying something very different about Syrian culture.

PAOLO DALL’OGLIO: No doubt. We live together, we cry together for so long, we laugh together for happiness, we really one friendly society to say. That’s why in our houses, Muslims and Christians you cannot even easily make the difference. You will see people together and you will not be able to know who are the Muslims who are the Christians in our town and countryside, so from this point of view I advise President Bush and his friends to come and visit, and change a little bit of their ideas about us. Here, I say, look Americans are complex, it is a complex society, like us, we are a complex society. We have not to simplify the relationships in the international level, and this means that we have to have a mood and a way to understand each other, without exclusions, without exclusions. And I tell you, Syrians are very keen and really able to understand that, because they are a complex society, they understand complexity and the reality is that Syria looks to Lebanon, to USA, to Europe, even to Israel, with the capacity of the complex analyses. They can understand things in their complexity, and that’s according to them.

NARRATOR: You have said in another interview that dialog really starts from being curious about others. That curiosity is indispensable to making peace. Even before you’re trying to make peace you have to let go of the story that people you don’t know you should be suspicious of, instead you say be curious about them, is that right?

PAOLO DALL’OGLIO: Yes, yes. I believe very much that we cannot come to others only with expectations. We need to come to look with open hopes and then to be able to understand that the other is in full right to be different from us, he has another story he start from other point of views and he has other needs, and other priorities. That’s why sometimes before speaking about peace; it’s better to speak in terms of truth. Truth means that we stop fighting and we create a space in which we can look to each other as human beings and start to be curious about the schedule of the other, the priority of the other, the passion of the other And then I can understand that somehow something new would happen in our relationship and a time of common evolution come to be possible.

NARRATOR: You said earlier that Syrians understand complexity. It also seems that at this point we need to understand paradox, if we’re going to be able to grasp at one and the same time both our differences and our commonalities, as being actually complementary to one another rather than contradictory.

PAOLO DALL’OGLIO: I agree with you, I like this paradoxes, I like paradoxes because paradoxes create something new out of two. It’s the capacity of sympathies of something that we have even not able to expect, just it comes from a real coming from our meeting, into something else, probably better.[LAUGHS]

NARRATOR: Yes that’s the interesting thing because the common notion is that the only way we’re going to get to peace is by letting go of much of what we care most about in order to reach some lowest common denominator. But is it possible that actually from what you’ve just said, that something better might emerge if we went about it with curiosity, rather than a sense of contradiction?

PAOLO DALL’OGLIO: Well, this past initiative is just an example what can be done that is more the diplomacy, it’s more than negotiation, it’s really able to glean true things together. And this will create kind of a longing. I tell you, as a human being, I’m from Rome, to think in terms of Europe, brought all of us out of nightmares that’s being such a disaster for Europe for so many centuries, and now it is so great to think in other terms. We have been able to conceive another level of thinking to something nicer in the end able to produce good and happiness for so many people. We have to think in those terms. I said yesterday within, with a Muslim friend that in the old Damascus, everybody was together, people eat, would say hello in the street with the Jewish and the Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Christians would be only in very little town of some 100,000 people, living together substantially peacefully and deeply accepting each other. And so, and then probably we have to start thinking about the Middle East like a big Damascus and we probably should be happier.

NARRATOR: Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, of the Deir Maramusa Monastery near Damascus.

NARRATOR: For 300 years, the patriarchs in Amir Mahallati’s family have been high-level clerics in Chiraz, Iran. A city famed for its lyrical poetry and lavish gardens. A Shiite Muslim and former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations during the Iran Iraq war, Amir Mahalati, has himself been made a Hojat al-Islam, a religious figure just one step below an Ayatollah. Dr. Mahallati has committed his life to bridging between Islam and the west, religion and secularism, Iran and the United States. He lives half the year on the east coast, where he’s taught at Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Georgetown Universities. The other half he spends in his native Iran. Amir Mahallati joins us now from the studios of public radio station WGBH in Boston. In a speech at Dartmouth, you spoke of the inclusiveness of Islam as a faith, and you said that the Koran contains a whole chapter on the Virgin Mary, uncountable references to Moses, 25 to Jesus Christ, 60 to Abraham and only three to Mohammad. How could that be?

AMIR MAHALLATI: I think this is a further confirmation and affirmation that Islam is not a religion separate from the message of Jesus Christ, Moses and Abraham and no one of the prophets. No unfortunately, as we have experienced today, we have divisions amongst organized religions but in essence all of these prophets were bringing the same message. There is no division, no difference. Therefore, in the Koran scripture, it is mentioned that Abraham was a Muslim, but Muslim not in the context in the sense of an organized religion as we experience today, but as the person who submitted to God, submitted himself totally and absolutely to God. In fact, I have to say that if somebody among the Muslims does not believe in Jesus Christ as a prophet or Moses as a prophet or Abraham as a prophet his faith is not complete, he cannot be considered Muslim. So a Muslim has by definition to believe in Jesus Christ and Moses and Abraham and others.

NARRATOR: Let’s go for a moment to the Haj, the pilgrimage. Now that’s a pilgrimage that’s entirely only for the faithful, is that right? For Muslims only, is that right?

AMIR MAHALLATI: Sure, yes it is.

NARRATOR: And there are many Christian pilgrimages as well, there are various traditions with their own pilgrimages and paths. The Abraham Path Initiative seeks to blend those and say that the faithful actually include the people beside you who may have a different specific faith. Is that something relatively new in religious and political history?

AMIR MAHALLATI: I think it is. If this initiative takes place, it is one of its kind, and very new to modern history, even to a certain extent to old history. Last year I participated in the first international conference of Muslim clergies and Jewish rabbis. It was the first time that I was talking to lots of Jewish religious authorities, and as we talked, as we ate together, as we spent time with each other, I found out that through anecdotes, through personal life, personal touch, you grasp by far more about the idea of the other side than when you just read about them. I may say that when you contact somebody, when you eat with somebody, when you walk with somebody, when you shake hands, when you share an anecdote, when you laugh at the same joke, when you cry at the same tragedy, this is a whole different experience. And I think Abrahamic initiative may bring this kind of understanding, mutual understanding. I think it was very important for me personally that when I talked to a number of rabbis in that conference, it added to my conviction that the divide among our, in our people of faith today, is not a divide between Muslims, Christians, Jews and others. It’s a divide between the moderates of all religions and the radicals of all religions. And this understanding I think is something that can be acquired by meeting people of other faith, rather than just to read about them.

NARRATOR: You know as the former Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, you have been a negotiator. Usually you sit across the table and you’re all stationary, and in a certain sense you’re in position at that table at that seat. When you’re walking together, does that create a different physics, almost a different kind of chemistry between people?

AMIR MAHALLATI: Definitely, when you have a direct contact with the other side, what I may say, the other, you know, as opposed to the self. It makes a whole big difference. I have been spending the last two years writing a book on ethics of war in Muslim cultures, contemplating and focusing on who is the enemy, who is the self, who is the other? More and more I came to the conclusion that all these notions of enemy, other, has absolutely no absolute meaning. There is no absolute enemy; there is no absolute other. So many times, within the body of the enemy or other or different, you find somebody much closer to yourself, than the people around you.

NARRATOR: Some people have observed that it’s precisely the thing that you find that’s like yourself that you can’t stand to acknowledge. In other words, if there’s a trait in the other side that you can’t abide, it’s because that trait exists in yourself and you won’t recognize it.

AMIR MAHALLATI: That’s very interesting. I agree with you. What is very important from my studies is that the main struggle within Islamic faith for example, is with the self rather than with the other. Rumi, a well-known figure now these days, brings a beautiful Islamic tradition, prophetic tradition, into poetry, and he mentions that there was a war led by Prophet Mohammed. And when the Muslims returned, when the warriors returned, then Prophet followed, you know, delivered a speech to them and said okay, you confronted the lesser enemy, the lesser war, and now you’re confronting with the bigger enemy and the bigger war. And the bigger enemy is the self, the carnal soul of yourself. So early on within Islamic literature, the self is introduced as the biggest enemy, and I think Abrahamic initiative will provide a golden opportunity for the followers of all three faiths to evaluate, reevaluate the notion of self versus others. And I think when they come out of that experience those defenitions will shatter, will change.

NARRATOR: Amir Mahalati, former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations. I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities. Distributed by the WFMT Radio network.

You’re listening to A World of Possibilities, a production of the Mainstream Media Project. If you wish to contact us, please direct emails to comments@aworldofpossibilities.com. This production is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

NARRATOR: I’m Mark Sommer and this is A World of Possibilities. This program, From Turmoil to Tourism: Following the Path of Abraham, is underwritten by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Coming up in this half hour, Dr. Tova Hartman Halbertal, at Shira Hadasha Synagogue in Jerusalem, and Imam FaizalAbdul Ralf of Majid Al Farah, in New York City. But first, we continue our conversation with Amir Mahalati, former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations. Dr. Mahalati joins us from the studios of public radio station WGBH in Boston. In order to transcend the conflicts that currently exist, do we need to go to that place of looking first to the self, not in selfishness but in self-examination? And also looking to the other as something other than an alien or an enemy but as another face of oneself?

AMIR MAHALLATI: This is not a question, this is an answer.

NARRATOR: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…

AMIR MAHALLATI: No, no, all I’m saying is that you said it perfectly. What I meant is that this is exactly what I would have come up, you know, this is the essence of the teachings of all great mystics. First of all, that right angle to look at the world is to love, to appreciate others and to criticize the self. Appreciate others and criticize the self. In that context, I was asked in one conference, is there any good religion out there? Or let’s say what is the essence of all religions? And I have come up with one conclusion, that if I carefully look at Koran and the old testament and the new testament and other faiths, probably if you reduced them to two words, we can come up with two single words. Apology and appreciation. Now apology addresses the shortcomings of the self, it is self-criticism. Vis a vis the beautiful world, vis a vis all the blessings that you know, it is in your access, vis a vis any shortcomings that you had in dealing with the world. And appreciation deals with others, with the external world, with the creation, with all the beauties of the world. So apology and appreciation are in my view the essence of all faiths, and it means self-accounting, and appreciating others. Start with yourself; criticize yourself before going to others.

NARRATOR: Does forgiveness exist in all three of these traditions? When you say apology that’s half of it, but the other part of it is to forgive both oneself and others, isn’t it? Or at least to let go of the anger and the resentments in some way? Is that in all three traditions?

AMIR MAHALLATI: Well of course it is, we already know that there are lots of mentions in the New Testament. We also have a great huge literature in Islam regarding what you just mentioned. This is that the saying of the prophet Mohammed, a good disposition, the best of manner is for those who forgive and forget the person who has deprived you of anything. To connect with the person who has severed his relations with you and to forgive whoever has had an act of oppression against you. This is the exact prophetic tradition. And as you see, a connection overlooking and forgiveness are the three things, which create the best of all manners for Muslims.

NARRATOR: Albert Einstein once said that we can’t solve the great problems we face at the same level at which they were created. In some ways, the conflicts in the middle east were created by political circumstances. Do we need to go to another level to resolve them, or maybe a few other levels? Is it possible that we need to go to a level of common spirit if not common religion, as well as a level of a most common economics?

AMIR MAHALLATI: Well I definitely support what you just said. First of all, I think what is most important is that to go back to the roots of the definition of who is the enemy. And if we carefully study the tradition of all faiths, we understand that the enemy, the bigger enemy again lives within ourselves rather than within somebody else. The second thing is that we have to depoliticize religion. I think this is one of the most important elements that has deteriorated the situation there in the Middle East. So depoliticization of religion, and not letting politicians to manipulate the religion in their favor, this is very important.

NARRATOR: Amir Mahallati, former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations. For Jewish perspective on the legacy of Abraham, we turn now to Dr. Tova Hartman Halbertal, a founder of Shira Hadasha, a new traditional synagogue in Jerusalem. She’s also worked at the Jerusalem Women’s Counseling Center and holds a master’s degree in Jewish philosophy from Hebrew University. Dr. Halbertal joins us now from her home in Jerusalem. People speak of the Abrahamic family and others recently have been saying well there’s an Abrahamic family quarrel that’s been going on for thousands of years. Like many families it’s dysfunctional, that is to say there is a particular bitterness that comes from being so closely related. How do you change that dynamic?

TOVA HARTMAN HALBERTAL: You know, sometimes I like the term dysfunctional family, at other times I feel like it belittles the situation because dysfunctional families sort of like argue, don’t speak to each other for a little while, go to group therapy. But I think what you need here is more than that. You know, people are killing each other; people’s lives are in danger. I think here it’s when so much history, nationalism, religion gets intertwined and people can’t envision a safer and better place, they can’t envision that you could ever be. Perhaps at first the American dream, which is called a good fence makes a good neighbor. Or the American ethos is the only way to have good neighbors is to have good fences. Now how do we create good fences here?

NARRATOR: Is the fence that’s being built a good fence?

TOVA HARTMAN HALBERTAL: Well I think part of it is good; part of it is not good, if it goes through somebody’s land it is not good. But I think that the idea that there may need to be a fence for a while that separates us is something that I think, probably a fence is what we would call a boundary. You know, that there would be an independent Palestinian state that can live with dignity and a Jewish state that will live in security, side by side. And is this Abraham’s dream? I don’t know, I don’t know. I think the Abraham Path Initiative was really to begin to meet people with different faiths that would just walk, literally walk along the path, walk through the Middle East, and meet each other as people, not necessarily as political adversaries and not necessarily I belong to this state and you belong to that state. But actually to begin trying to have room for other ways of just meeting each other, and I think that is the vision of the Abrahamic Path. I wanted to say in some of my work, you know when I give lectures and talks with feminist Muslims and Christians together we have such a deep affinity to each other, it’s like we look and say, well why don’t we just leave the rabbis, the priests and everybody else and let’s just do something on our own.

NARRATOR: There are probably those connections to be made with virtually any human being, you just have to find the right level where the synapses connect.

TOVA HARTMAN HALBERTAL: Very much. So I think if we keep that as a goal, and I mean here I may contradict what I just said. Good fences make good neighbors, they make perhaps livable neighbors, but they’ll never make great neighbors. There’s no love with good fences, you have to cross over the fence and come into our home.

NARRATOR: Well you know, one of the oldest forms of neighborliness, at least in North America, is to lean across the fence between two homes and just have a chat with one another.

TOVA HARTMAN HALBERTAL: Yeah, well that’s, that’s exactly it, I mean are the fences so thick and the walls so thick that there really is no chance to lean over or not?

NARRATOR: Well there can be fences and there can be gates too.

TOVA HARTMAN HALBERTAL: Exactly, and I think what are the gates?

NARRATOR: And there also can be commons, there can be marketplaces, there can be meeting places.

TOVA HARTMAN HALBERTAL: Yes. I think the notion of really of love, of developing love between people doesn’t happen through fences, though. It may be the first step that we may have to have just for survival, but I think we need things like the Abrahamic Path to walk together actually, to literally walk together the walk, that’s a crucial component of how we can ever hope to get somewhere beyond just the struggle for mere survival, which is exhausting which makes people fear which makes people suspicious, which makes people afraid. And as we know, fear turns so quickly into hate. One of the things when I was interviewed about what it was like to bring up children here in Israel, and I said, one of the things I have to work so hard on myself, when there’s a bomb there’s another bomb and the fear is so quick to start generalizing to start being filled with hate. And it happens on the other side totally right away same way. And how to keep educating our children to feel safe, telling them don’t go here, don’t do this and all, to know I don’t let you out tonight there’s this. To be able to try to bring them up safely but not to have fear turn into hate and bitterness, but to have fear be an impetus to say we can’t continue living with fear, we have to do something positive to change it. You know, that’s the dream, that’s the dream.

NARRATOR: Tova Hartman Halbertal, Professor at Hebrew University and one of the founders of Shira Hadassah Synagogue. Coming up, Imam Feical Abdul Rauf.

This is A World of Possibilities, a production of the Mainstream Media Project. Copies of this program are available on CD and can be requested by email at comments@aworldofpossibilities.com.

NARRATOR: Abraham never walked the streets of New York, but Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf does. He’s Imam at Masjid Al Fahd Mosque, only twelve blocks from the World Trade Center site. Born in Kuwait and educated all over the world, he’s the founder for the American Society for Muslim Advancement, a not for profit organization seeking to foster an American Muslim identity and build bridges between American Muslims and a broader American public. He’s the author of What’s Right With Islam, a new vision for Muslims in the west. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf joins us by phone from his home in New Jersey. Did you find that 9/11 dramatically shifted your efforts?

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: No doubt, 9/11 was a watershed, in capitalizing the attention towards the issue of Islam’s presence in the west, initially after 9/11 like many Muslims we were invited to speak. We answered many questions but also were approached by people from the other faith communities as to what could be done. There was a recognition that this is an issue that has a history and you need to understand the history that has brought us to where we are today, and then how do we move forward? I founded the Cordoba Initiative in 2002. We have given ourselves till the year 2015 to bring about what we could call a tipping point in relationship between the united States and the Islamic world on all the various fronts or frontiers or boundary lines, where the west in general and the Islamic world in general intersect. There are issues of media, communications, issues of education. So considering those three broad areas as areas which what needs to be done to reframe the way we look at these questions, the way we think about them has been an important part of our work.

NARRATOR: You’ve written in a new book that you call What’s Right with Islam, that the United States is substantively an Islamic country.

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: Yes.

NARRATOR: What do you mean by that?

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: What I mean by that is that the foundation of societal contract on which the American declaration of Independence is based, is something which is fundamentally Islamic and more broadly Abrahamic. The Abrahamic ethic is one which fundamentally posits the idea that all human beings are equal. And we say this in our declaration; we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights. They’re inalienable because they adhere in the nature of being human, our rights are given to us by the Creator, they cannot be taken away from us. By any human agency, any government agency. Well, that particular existential world viewpoint is fundamentally Islamic viewpoint. And then the question goes on to speak about the laws of nature and of nature’s God. All of Islamic law, what we call the Sharia, are intended to further to protect and for the five matter objectives of the laws, living five centuries or more before Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. And these five matter objectives of Islamic law, are the protection and furtherance of the right to life; to religion; to property; to family and to the intellect. And we can see here resonances already between life and property are explicitly the rights to be enjoyed and protected in both world viewpoints, and one can argue the fact that religion, family and pursuance of intellectual expansion and so forth is part of the pursuit of happiness. So we can see resonances here between the fundamental core viewpoints and values of the Declaration of Independence and the Islamic worldview.

NARRATOR: As I understand it Abraham himself is not viewed as a deity, he is a human being.

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: Yes.

NARRATOR: It’s interesting that a human being would be the father of all three religions, not some divine figure, and that he was in a certain sense a man who kept learning all his life. What can we learn from a closer look at Abraham perhaps that might enable us to be as accepting of both the differences and the similarities between them?

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: According to the ethical program shared by the Christianity, Judaism and Islam as we call them today, is a very important theme, which are those two major commandments that I mentioned earlier. That is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself, or to not do to your neighbor what you would not want done upon you. As Jesus Christ said, upon these two commandments hang all the laws of the prophets. And Islamic law builds upon those commandments, and what was common about the Abrahamic traditions as I said, the equality of men, it is by your actions, you know, as he said, by their fruits you shall know them. It is the ethics of an individual human being that determines his value or his nobility in the eyes of God. And the Koran says that, all people are created from one male and one female, and we fashioned you into the varieties of nations and tribes so that you might celebrate your differences, that you might get to know each other. The most noble of you in the eyes of God are those who are most ethical, which all implies the idea of loving God and loving your fellow human beings.

NARRATOR: You’ve mentioned in your writings one particularly interesting insight. It says that the Koran states that God does not change the condition of a people until they change themselves.

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: Yes.

NARRATOR: What do you mean by that?

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: Well I mean, that’s what the Koran literally says. I think this ties into the fact that God has granted human beings freedom of will, and free or freedom of will in the domain of actions, which we deem to be of an ethical nature. And therefore, as Jews sometimes say, we are co-creators with God in what we do. In other words, there are other words in the Koran, which say God, although God has the power to force a human being to believe in him, he does not enforce that. You have to choose, and if

you choose to believe in God, then God will help you and give you the faith. So our ethical actions are decisions, are based upon the fact that we have to be proactive. What happens in life is the vector sum of our will and the divine will. And therefore, if we want to change a situation, we have to be proactive and engaged, and then God will walk with us and God will help us and will open doors for us and create this what we believe to be serendipitous but nothing is serendipitous from the point of view of an all knowing creator.

NARRATOR: But to change ourselves, does that mean that the first thing you need to change when you’re in a conflict is your own attitude about it?

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: That’s the mystical interpretation of it, that if you want to change your relationships with the outer world, changing yourself is the fastest route. So if you have a bad relationship with someone, for example, the most expeditious way and a very important part of doing it, is to work on yourself, because there’s something within yourself that is creating the energy field or the kinds of stimuli that cause people to react in a certain way. So if we act on ourselves and make sure that we are the best possible type of a human being, if we express the values that the belief prophets come to embody, we express the prophets and the saintly people, who reflect the highest ethical evolution of what it means to be human, that you will find people reacting to you differently. And when we act that way as an individual, as a community, as a nation, the world itself will change its attitude towards us.

NARRATOR: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, of the Masjid Al Fahd Mosque in New York City.

NARRATOR: In the conflicted desert landscape of the Middle East, religion has largely been a source of division for hundreds, even thousands of years; not only between faiths but within them. In fact the fiercest among these conflicts have been family quarrels, as we see today in the sectarian warfare between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Iraq. So the fact that the three great religions of the Middle East share the same forefather is not inherently a unifying factor. The bible itself is rife with tragic tales of brother set against brother, for the favor of a father. Yet Abraham, or Ibrahim, is a uniquely unifying figure, or as our guests today made clear, he favored none of his sons over the other, but loved them all equally. As a human rather than a divine being, he struggled to accept the sometimes-harsh dictates of his master, interceding and negotiating for mercy on behalf of a highly imperfect humanity. To overcome the millennia of bloodshed and bitterness that scar the ancient landscape of the Middle East, we would do well to follow in Abraham’s footsteps, by adopting his receptivity and openness to the stranger and the other. It’s said that his tent was always open in all directions, welcoming all without regard to their faith or even lack of it. This unconditional acceptance, which lies at the heart of all the great wisdom traditions, has too often been lost in the endless argument over whose religion is more faithful to the one true God. Yet it’s the perennial pilgrim and welcoming spirit, Abraham seems a particularly appropriate figure to invoke in the effort to transform the Holy Land from the turmoil of religious and political conflict to the epicenter of ecumenical tourism. As Europe emerging in devastation from two World Wars and centuries of conflict, created a Common Market as the basis for cultural and economic unity, so today the possibility of a vastly expanded tourist industry, based on the mutual appreciation of common ancestry, could serve as the engine for shared prosperity. It’s a far distance from whence we find ourselves today, where Abrahams’ footsteps have been lost in the desert landscape, but in retracing his ancient path, the pilgrim’s task is to bring new life and meaning to both a journey and the destination. And in that spirit, it’s the work not just of the descendants of Abraham, but of all of us, to join in walking the pilgrim’s path. I’m Mark Sommer, and this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.

You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities. For more information on today’s topic, please click on the listener action link at aworldofpossibilites.com. This program was produced and edited by Chuck Rogers, Tim Silva, and Malia Mulder-Wollan. Production engineer is Chuck Johnson. Special thanks to William Ury and Josh Weiss at the Global negotiation Project at Harvard University. Support for this program was provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Music is courtesy of Atoll Music, Putumayo World Music, Rounder Records, Rhino Atlantic Records, Zebra Records and Rising Sun Records. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network. Thank you for listening.

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