A Christian’s Response to Anti-Islamic Extremism

Hey Everyone, I wrote an Op-ed about the attack on the Dayton Mosque last week, following the distribution of the film Obsession

See it Here

A Week in Sudan

Hey All,

Here’s my blog post from last week in Sudan:

http://worldfaith.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/a-week-in-sudan/

Hope all is well!

In Closing…

This is a condensed version of my final write-up for the Fellows Alliance. See full version  on my new blog here:

http://worldfaith.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/in-closing/

Reflecting on the past year as a part of IFYC Fellows Alliance is a difficult undertaking.  Though the intent initially was likely based on trainings and campus work, I feel like the best parts of it were by-products of this intent, such as the great opportunities I was granted from the IFYC, and the potentially life-lasting friendships that started out of the fellowship.                

              The contact network I have developed with IFYC’s staff’s help is global and powerful, and I am sure that I will continue to utilize it as a develop World Faith further as an organization, but I do not believe that even the contacts are the most valuable aspect of the year.  I believe the most lasting impact of the Fellow’s Alliance on my life with be that of personal connections. 

            The fellowship will most likely remind me of the mixture of parsing Bob Marley lyrics, discussing theological friction-points, and theorizing program ideas with Soofia Ahmed, Farah Qureshi, and Hafsa Kanjal.  Or perhaps having some of the most blunt discourses possible with Jessica Kent and Anne Bouthilette.  Even possibly being completely and obnoxiously unproductive and crazy with Joshua Stanton and Nadeem Modan, or holding jovial yet inspiring conversations with Austin Maness.  Every Fellow represents more than a contact to me, but a memory and a friend.  The staff of IFYC represents more than just human resource, but mentors and family.  As a Christian, I believe that God is Love, and where Love is, God has blessed.  This rubric elucidates the value of our work, as we are able to live as examples of what interfaith cooperative can look like, in a world of compassion and understanding.

            As I conclude this paragraph, I am completely my year-long commitment to the Fellow’s Alliance.  However, with the end of the Fellowship, I see the beginning of a career in making the interfaith movement, a long journey in personal growth in faith, and life-long friendships that will remind us why we even bothered to try to make a difference in the first place.

 

In Peace and Love,

 

Frank Fredericks

Former IFYC Fellow

 

5-5-08

So ive been really slacking on these blogs and i truly appologize to those of you who are actually interested in my life. Ive been rather busy lately trying to figure out my life with school and work.  I recently had a pretty exciting event with just a handful of people regarding the ASK BIG QUESTIONS handbook.  I really didnt think it would be such a success, but i was so wrong..Everyone loved the questions and were really mesmorized by how deep you can get into each question.  I planned this event to get people excited about the second part of the event which will be this weekend and wil be more faith oriented.  It was really cool to see people taking some of those questions and actually reffering them to faith without me even asking them too.  That just made it easier for me to transition into the faith question.  However, I did not get to deep in to the faith part because i want to focus mainly on that this weekend.  PS>  people love dialogues with coffee and donuts..ahah..

In other events..My sister is coming to visit on friday so i am super excited to see her..

American Values

This morning I read this article about a recent controversy in New York, which some of you may have already been following. I don’t know much about the case beyond what’s in the article below, but it looks like a substance-less railroading of a woman, Debbie Almontaser, who wanted to open an Arabic language academy in the city. Every time I read about one more case like this my heart breaks and I cry a little more for my country and what is being perpetrated in its name.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/nyregion/28school.html?pagewanted=6&_r=1&h

What really touched me in this article beyond the case, which I admittedly just heard about, is the depiction of a whole host of groups and politicians setting their sights on eliminating rising ‘Muslim participation in public life.’ One thing I know for sure is that the current threat to America does not lie in Muslims and Arabs who want to join “public life.” While violence and terrorism from any group are real threats, wanting to join public life is the greatest signal of appreciation for and participation in the great American project, which has for generations incorporated the new ideas and influences of immigrants into the “melting pot.” This is certainly not the first time in our history such a false danger has been claimed — Catholics in the 19th century were often characterized by the press and public officials as incapable of free thought and a danger to America. Their resulting marginalization from public schools helped lead to the wide network of parochial schools many non-Catholics of this century have benefited from. I don’t think anyone could today claim that the contributions of Catholics to public and political life were either small or negative, or that they didn’t productively add to the tenor of American life. Examples like this of misguided and detrimental prejudice abound in our history.

I am so proud to live in a country where pluralism and freedom have been expressed as our highest legal and social values. I am finding myself often ashamed at the failure of my public officials to uphold these values, and the total cowardice displayed in their reluctance to even acknowledge these freedoms might be violated! The real threat I see to the country that I love lies in the ignorant (or, I pray not, malicious) officials and press who are willing to put prejudice and confusion above freedom and to ignore their highest political calling in favor of their basest impulses. My frustration and trembling fingers have made this one of my less clear discussions of this topic, but I wonder about how all you out there respond when you see public officials ignoring and mis-defining our basic rights and responsibilites. I noted that the main figure in this case, Ms. Almontaser, had been a part of and remains active in local interfaith groups and initiatives. That hasn’t helped her yet, but when we see misconceptions or injustice in our community how can we respond politically as interfaith-ers, as well as educators and diaolog-ers and servants to our communities?

Is there a limit to freedom of religion?

I know this isn’t exactly the purpose of the blog, but I’m interested to hear whether you guys have been thinking about/talking about the recent raids on the FLDS compound in El Dorado, Texas.  We talked in one of my community health classes today about how to figure out where the line is between respecting someone’s culture and freedom of religion versus protecting people’s (specifically children’s) health.  I don’t really know how to answer that question in general, and it’s very hard to see a good solution to this situation.  Here’s a link to a video of some of the mothers.  I’d love to hear people’s thoughts, or the reactions on your campuses if there are any.

http://search.cnn.com/search.jsp?query=flds&type=video&sortBy=date&intl=false

Disconnect

Last night there was a ‘spiritual arts’ origami workshop, today there will be an Interfaith Vigil in Remembrance of the Virginia Tech shooting and  ‘What is religion?’ talk, tomorrow we are holding Islam 101, and on Saturday my University is holding its first Interfaith Day of Service for Earth Day, complete with IFYC-style dialogs. From sadness to gladness, it’s a busy week for interfaith work on my campus. It’s a big interfaith week personally as well, as I prepare to go to my boyfriend’s house for Passover.

But as excited as I am about all of these events, there is sometimes a disconnect for me between the excitement about Interfaith initiatives that I see on my campus and in my personal life and what I see reported in the news I read everyday. An anti-immigrant (religiously inflected) party won astoundingly in Italy, there’s still a Dutch politician making a movie claiming the Qu’ran is all about violence, and I routinely see references to religion in newspapers that ignore minority faiths or just say ignorant things. There are, of course, alternatives and positive stories. But I am disappointed to see the stories dominating the conversation when I see so much positive engagement going on around me.

I suppose the answer is in this work and the work of organizations like it. It has certainly encouraged me to figure out how to focus a little more on wider media (shout out to IFYC’s October student/media conference), but my frustrations remain. I think may also be the actual spread of different negative and positive engagement in different places, and it’s frustrating not being able to effect change in the places where I don’t work. Well, here’s to developing the world connections more, and to getting people to pay attention to the movement under their nose,

Hannah

Fellows Withdrawl…

Hello Everyone,

I miss you all so much! I guess that I came back home from last weekend’s retreat expecting to be fully charged and ready to finish up all my school work. I never thought that this weekend would tire me out this much! I guess the intensity of our conversations was kind of like running a marathon, albeit an intellectual one… I just wanted to reiterate how much you have taught me. Before the Fellows Alliance I never knew the true satisfaction of sincere interfaith dialogue. I’m re-energized and looking forward to continue IF work on my campus and on my community in the coming year. I hope we keep in touch!

Thanks and in peace,

soofia

Can’t Wait for the Meeting!

Hey, I just wanted to briefly write how excited I am to see everyone! I can’t wait to hear what people have been up to, both in the IF world and in general.  See you soon!Josh 

A Mystical Journey

This past Saturday I attended a concert entitled A Mystical Journey: Sufi music and other Expressions of Devotion from the Muslim world. The concert included a variety of artists from different countries, including Salman Ahmed, member of a popular Pakistani rock band Junoon, who undoubtedly was the crowd favorite to Choir Hazreti Hamza, a Sufi Bosnian group that was founded during the civil war in Yugoslavia to a group of American Ismaili men and women that recited devotional “songs” called ginans. While each performer came from a different tradition of Islam, what they all had in common was their ability to find spirituality through music and dance. As well as the ability to spread this spirituality throughout the audience. It was not in what they were saying, but in how they said it, in their body language that demonstrated what they felt about their faith and God (I recall my mom saying after a performance by Houria Aichi, an Algerian woman, that she did not understand what Houria said, as it was in Arabic, but was truly touched by it). I too was touched by the performances like my mom, however, there were two performances that really mesmerized me. The first was a group from Syria called Tahleelah which was headed by Sheikh Hamza Chakour and included four whirling dervishes. This was my first time seeing whirling dervishes and I was truly taken aback by their performance. Their ability to spin, thinking only of God, and letting go of what was around them was truly amazing. The second was the performance by a man named Sain Zahoor who came from a small village in Punjab, Pakistan who could not read nor write and would memorize his songs by drawing them out. He began his journey after he received, what he felt, a calling from God to bring forth his talent and use it to sing about his faith. There was something in him and his songs that really made me feel spiritual that I still cannot understand. What the concert was attempting to demonstrate, and what I felt to be most important, was how different traditions of Islam ”manifest their beliefs through diverse forms of devotion.” It is not only in traditional prayer and solace that we find God, but through songs, dances and other forms of devotion that God can be remembered.

Despite our differences, we’re really quite similiar.

A few weeks ago, the Johns Hopkins Foreign Affairs Symposium and the British Embassy hosted a panel discussion about Perceptions of Islam in the West. I was invited to be the student representative who provided a personal account of the quote “Muslim American experience.” Funny enough, what I realized was that the experience of being a religious person in this country is no different for a Muslim than it is for a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Buddhist. The way I see it, being a Muslim in America is precisely what brought me into the interfaith movement, so I thought I’d share my remarks from that evening with you all here.

Thank you, Kristof

Great article by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/opinion/09kristof.html?ex=1205812800&en=47179812ab063064&ei=5070

 It’s been so unsettling for me, as an American Muslim, to observe the media frenzy around the “allegations” of Obama being Muslim. Unfortunately, in the midst of the campaign trying hard to deny these allegations, it seems that no one is asking—Why should it matter? 

Dean of Religious Life?

I have a question for everyone sort of akin to Josh’s. Last year our Dean of Rockefeller Chapel, who runs the Inter-religious Center and has a big influence in all religious and inter-religious programming on campus (at some of your campuses s/he would be Dean of Religious Life, etc.), left for another school. We are currently in the last stages of hiring a new one, and I have been attending the visiting sermons and trying to get to the receptions for the candidates. What do you all think I should be looking for? Are there attributes of your administrators you think are particularly helpful or unhelpful?

Preparing for Justice

    Some other bloggers may have heard this story before, but it’s been on my mind a lot lately. The first time I got involved with interfaith work was two summers ago, when I worked for Interfaith Worker Justice as an organizer on the Memphis Living Wage Campaign. During training, organizers of various faiths from their Seminary Summer Program and I all went to a one week training together in Chicago where, among other things, we created our own interfaith worship services. These remain some of my favorite services that I have ever attended.

A few days in a self-described ‘open orthodox’ Rabbi, Turkish Muslim woman studying to lead faith initiatives, and I were working together to create a worship. We began talking about a service based around the body’s role in worship — with dance, eating and drinking, etc. I started wondering aloud if we could try some of the distinct physical ways of praying, and asked if it would be appropriate for one of our Muslim colleagues to lead us in the rhythm of a noon prayer.  The Rabbi stopped me and said, “We
l l, a lot of the Jews wouldn’t be able to participate.” I was confused. He explained that since the Temple was destroyed, many Jews believe they can not prostrate themselves to God until the Temple is built again, except at a few very special times of year. He felt it was to make sure that you wait to be in the right mind, in the right heart, to really prostrate yourself and be wholly in prayer to God. He said that there had been times when he felt great jealousy watching his Muslim brothers and sisters in prayer, because sometimes he wanted to just enter in to this kind of bowing prayer as well. Our Muslim fellow explained that for her, these physical positions several times a day helped her to put her self in a right frame of mind, to prepare herself for being in a right heart to approach God.

First, I was fascinated, and second, I was going over in my head every time I had prayed, and how my body affected my intention. This was one of the incredible examples in my life where deep and unfettered interaction with people of other faiths expanded my own faith and understanding. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately because I’ve been thinking about intention. It is hard for me to balance my knowledge that I don’t always have the my mind totally committed and clear about works of justice I want to pursue, and that could make them less, with the knowledge that if I wait to be completely clear about my intentions nothing will ever happen. Particularly in my attempts to face the people around me with open kindness (a particular goal I’m working on this Lenten season), I struggle with how much I need to prepare myself to be kinder before hand and how much just to say the kind thing until real kindness enters my heart.

I may not be being clear at all, but I thought I’d share that meditation I’ve been having lately, and hope you all are well!

The Lunge: The Conviction becomes a Life Sentence

So the big question everyone is asking me: 

 ”Frank, What’s  next?”

 Other than praying that I don’t fail my final two classes and working hard at the Italian culture organization, I have reached an epiphany.  I will work full-time on World Faith after I graduate.  I will take the Lunge

 If finding a job isn’t intimidating, most people think it is crazy to attempt to be self-employed.  However I am going a step further and doing so with a non-profit.  I also run a record label, but I very well may close it during the summer if it does not progress profitably.  So I will begin working to secure funding  for the project between now and graduation.  If by graduation we have not raised sufficient funds for full-time support, I will continue with my summer plans of developing and building our projects in India, Lebanon, and Egypt.

 In the meantime we are considering adding a new program to the World Faith network which will essentially be a music camp for Palestinian and Israeli children in Israel.  We are exploring logistically how that association would take form.  Our programming team at NYU has grown to over 10 as begin planning for our WEEK of Interfaith Service, coming this April.  This will be my last event as Chapter President of World Faith NYU, and begin my journey of realizing the worthy ideal of World Faith. 

That’s all for now.  I wish I had more to write, but as the opportunities abound, ambiguity resides.  In the next 6 weeks I will be in conferences in Boston, the CGI in New Orleans, Chicago, and on a panel at the Q Conference in NYC.  I see that my past two posts, over a month old each, are still on the top list, so its nice to know someone else out there is reading.  As long as that’s the case I will try to keep writing…  

Interfaith Shabbat

I’m very excited to report that our first ever joint services event held by Peace of Mind went exceptionally well! Although fewer people were able to attend each others’ services as we would have liked, we nonetheless shared a beautiful Shabbat meal together at Hillel and had a remarkable turnout for the after-dinner discussion. Twenty people stayed for an hour-and-a-half after dinner at Hillel and I had to cut off the discussion because they would have stayed all night! Our discussion of “Prayer in Your Faith” covered the issues of logistics of prayer (physical movements), considering the obligation to pray, and the role of women in our faiths, especially the issue of separate seating for men and women in prayer services. The Jewish students were particularly interested in finding out what the Muslim students thought on all of these issues. I was very pleased with the discussion and was heartened by the fact that everyone participated and had a great time and seemed to want to repeat the event. We even got a write-up in the Daily! (See below.) I’m also very much looking forward to Peace of Mind’s IFYC training tomorrow evening. I can’t wait to see what Naomi and Jenan have cooked up for our group Tomorrow also marks the second week of Peace of Mind’s new volunteer program. We are volunteering at the Evanston Foster Reading Center which is part of the local YMCA. We read with K-2nd graders and help them with their homework, and then play with them in the gym as they get out all of their after-school energy. The kids are very sweet (if a tad manic) and we had a great time last week. Peace of Mind has been really active this term and we are looking forward to a full term of events and programs in the Spring!

On a personal note, I am anxiously awaiting Spring Break since I will be traveling to Mississippi with Northwestern’s Alternative Student Break program to build houses as part of the Katrina relief effort. While it is not an interfaith service program, I will be interested to see if the issue of faith comes up since we will be working with a religious organization in Mississippi who is coordinating us (they are religious Christians). Maybe I will have a chance to slip in some interfaith dialogue on the sly

Interfaith services highlight similarities of different religions

Students compare Islamic, Jewish prayer services

By: Ashley Lau

Posted: 2/25/08

As Challah bread traveled around the Shabbat table Friday evening at the Fiedler Hillel Center, Weinberg juniors Mohammad Ahmad and Jason Gutstein sat side by side to celebrate the Jewish tradition of the Sabbath.

Looking past the violence and disputes of a war-torn Middle East, Ahmad, of Islamic faith, and Gutstein, of Jewish faith, gathered with about 70 other students to meet over a kosher meal as a part of the interfaith day planned by Peace of Mind, Northwestern’s Muslim-Jewish dialogue group.

“It’s a wonderful thing to bring together both groups of students,” Rabbi Josh Feigelson said. “It’s important for promoting an understanding.”

The interfaith events began Friday afternoon when students of different religions assembled in Parkes Hall to join in the Muslim-cultural Students Association’s Jum’ah, or Friday, prayers. Later that evening, the students walked over to Hillel to take part in Reform, Conservative and Orthodox services. This is the first year Peace of Mind coordinated joint observances between the two religions.

The interfaith observance was designed to expose students to religions different from their own, said Gutstein, who with Ahmad is co-president of Peace of Mind.

“It gives Northwestern students the opportunity to see how Jews and Muslims on campus approach religion and their observance of religion,” Gutstein said. “It exposes each group to each other’s services so they can see the commonalities between prayers and prayer services.”

Peace of Mind began about four years ago when three women at NU came together to address the controversy over the violence surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ahmad said. Shortly after the Second Intifada uprising broke out in Palestine in 2000, the students decided something needed to be done in response to the growing hostility abroad.

“They said, ‘This isn’t OK,’” Gutstein said. “They wanted to figure out a way to respond to the atmosphere on campus and build an understanding of different cultures.”

Ahmad and Gutstein, along with other members of Peace of Mind, began planning the day of interfaith observance last quarter after realizing that both religious services fall on the same day.

After dinner, about 20 students stayed for another two hours to discuss their personal interpretations and understandings of Islam and Judaism through an interfaith discussion led by the group.

During the intimate dialogue, the group discussed the commonalities between the two prayer services. Both involve physical movement, a series of individual and group prayers, and are recited in a non-English language, the group said. Like Muslim services, Orthodox Jewish services separate men and women.

“It was really interesting to see how they also use physical movement,” Weinberg sophomore Fizza Hussain said. Using a translation of the Hebrew passages and prayers, Hussain sat in on the Reform and Conservative services at Hillel.

Communication sophomore Samantha Berry, who is Jewish, said this is the first year she had ever held a conversation with a Muslim student.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Berry said. “There were a lot of similarities in that there is an importance in coming together and in how it is preferable to pray with other people.”

a-lau@northwestern.edu

---

© Copyright 2008 The Daily Northwestern