Young Liberians Beginning to Realize Their Potential
Celeste Visser discusses the research conducted by the multidisciplinary team.
Less than a decade after Charles Taylor went into exile, Liberia remains a fragile democracy blighted by corruption and a high unemployment rate. Tuesday, September 18, The Washington Network on Children and Armed Conflict, in collaboration with Search for Common Ground, hosted Tom Brownlee and Celeste Visser, researchers from American University, and Mohammed A. Nasser, President of the Federation of Liberian Youth (FLY), in a discussion of the challenges confronting young Liberians today. Brownlee and Visser, part of a six-person multidisciplinary team working in collaboration with SFCG and 24 representatives from donor agencies, worked with youth in Liberia in an effort to understand what potential the future holds for their country. read more…
In the first part of a series introducing the recipients of our upcoming Common Ground Awards, we would like to highlight the achievements of three distinguished interfaith leaders. They have dedicated themselves to promoting awareness of and respect for religious diversity worldwide. These figures have not shied away from openly discussing and engaging with difficult and controversial issues and have given themselves in service to dialogue and illuminating the issues and challenges we face in developing respect and understanding among diverse religions.
Archbishop George Carey
Lord Carey was enthron
ed as the 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury in April 1991 and retired from his position in November 2002. As the leader of the Anglican community worldwide, he played a key role in relationships with other denominations and faiths in the United Kingdom and beyond, and saw the ordination of the church’s first women priests. He has served as Chair of the Trustees of the World Faiths Development Dialogue since 2003. In 2004, he became co-chair of the Council of 100 Leaders (World Economic Forum), promoting understanding and dialogue between Western and Islamic worlds. His publications include The Gate of Glory (1992), as well as Why I Believe in a Personal God: The Credibility of Faith in a Doubting Culture (2000), and a recent autobiography, Know the Truth: A Memoir (2004). In February 2012, he co-authored with his son, Andrew, We Don’t Do God. Lord Carey served as Chancellor of the University of Gloucestershire until 2010 and is at present, President of the London School of Theology. Lady Eileen Carey has long served in the medical profession as a nurse with St. Luke’s Healthcare for the Clergy.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is the Founder of The Cordoba Initiative, an independent, multi-faith, and multi-national project that works to improve Muslim-West relations. Under Imam Feisal’s leadership, the Cordoba Initiative’s programs craft strategic avenues for approaching divisive Muslim-West tensions. The programs include the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT), which cultivates the next generation of Muslim leaders from all over the world, and the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE), which empowers Muslim women globally. In 1997, he co-founded the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), the first Muslim organization committed to building bridges between Muslims and the American public by elevating the discourse on Islam through educational outreach, interfaith collaboration, culture, and the arts. Imam Feisal is a Trustee of the Islamic Center of New York and Vice Chair on the board of the Interfaith Center of New York. Recipient of numerous awards, Imam Feisal was listed as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2010 by Foreign Policy magazine. In April 2011, Time magazine named him among the 100 most influential people of the world. Imam Feisal and his wife, Daisy Khan, Co-Founder and Executive Director of ASMA, received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award in 2011.
Rabbi David Rosen
Rabbi David Rosen, former 
Chief Rabbi of Ireland, is the International Director of Interreligious Affairs of AJC and Director of its Heilbrunn Institute for International Interreligious Understanding. Rabbi Rosen is Honorary Advisor on Interfaith Relations to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel; serves on its Commission for Interreligious Dialogue, and represents the Chief Rabbinate on the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land. He is International President of Religions for Peace; Honorary President of the International Council of Christians and Jews; and serves on the World Council of Religious Leaders. Rabbi Rosen was a member of the Permanent Bilateral Commission of Israel and the Vatican that negotiated the establishment of full diplomatic normalization of relations between the two. He has been a member of the Advisory Committee of the World Congress of Imams and Rabbis and of the World Economic Forum’s C-100, a council of 100 leaders formed for the purpose of improving relations and cooperation between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. In November 2005 he was made a papal Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great for his contribution to promoting Catholic-Jewish reconciliation and in 2010 was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by H.M. Queen Elizabeth II for his contribution to interfaith relations. Rabbi Rosen’s wife, Sharon Rosen, is Co-Director of Search for Common Ground in Jerusalem.
The Common Ground Awards will be presented at the Carnegie Institution for Science on November 8, 2012 at 8:00pm in Washington, DC. The Awards are presented annually by Search for Common Ground to honor outstanding accomplishments in conflict resolution, negotiation, community and peace building. Recipients have made significant contributions toward bridging divides between people, finding solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and providing inspiration and hope where often there was none. Past recipients of the Award include: President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Muhammad Ali, Sesame Workshop, and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.
“In a world where adversarial behavior is so prevalent, we honor people who build bridges and resolve conflict” said John Marks, President and Founder of Search for Common Ground. “These are our heroes, and it feels wonderful to celebrate them.”
Other 2012 Common Ground Awardees
Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Respected TV, radio, and print journalist who integrated the University of Georgia as one of its first two African-American students; author of recently published “To The Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil rights Movement.”
Ingoma Nshya (“New Era”)
Rwanda’s only female Hutu and Tutsi drumming troupe and the subject of the new documentary film Sweet Dreams.
Peace Child International
Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Peace Child International empowers young people to be the change they want to see in the world, by encouraging youth to become informed and then take action.
Additional award TBA
Democracy in the Wake of the Arab Spring
Our distinguished panel. From left to right: Joseph V. Montville, Dr. Muqtedar Khan, Dr. Azizah al-Hibri, Dr. Laith Kubba, and Dr. Peter Mandaville.
By Christopher White
In the face of recent events in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), there are some voices in the media that continue to be skeptical of the region’s democratic transition. For these figures, the Arab Spring has been a cause of anxiety. It was good timing then that we recently held the second Conflict Prevention & Resolution Forum (CPRF) in our Democracy & Conflict series, “The Middle East and Arab Spring: Prospects for Sustainable Peace.”
The conversation that took place was illuminating and one of the main takeaways that struck me was that none of the speakers saw state-building as an airy abstraction. Working to realize a new form of politics in the states shaken by the Arab Spring will have to take account of the cultural context in which they are enmeshed. read more…
Social values, not religion, at the heart of Muslim protests
The following article was written by Leena El-Ali for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) on September 18, 2012. You can find the original post here.
Washington, DC – In the past week, Muslim-Western relations have come back under the global media spotlight after widespread protests in several Middle Eastern, Asian and African countries. Most people find the video that sparked the protests, Innocence of Muslims, to be indeed insulting to Islam and Muslims. At the same time many people in the United States and elsewhere have emphasised that it is nonetheless an inviolable expression of free speech, and have suggested that it can at best simply be ignored. Indeed, a huge number of Muslims agree.
We have seen this tension play out before, most notably six years ago during the controversy over offensive cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, which were published in several European newspapers.
As before, this is not so much a confrontation between Islam and the West – or with democratic values – as it is a collision between a world where “traditional” values remain of paramount importance, and one where the values of a modern, “individualist” society reign supreme. Social values, rather than religion per se, are at the heart of the matter.
In Western societies, individual rights are accorded the highest value. Yet the average Muslim outside the West cannot understand why a government would not intervene to stop something so self-evidently appalling. In his or her mind, this question is linked to the role of government – rather than religion. But to the Western mind-set, it cannot possibly be a function of government, so it must therefore be a problem of religion.
It may well be true that certain Muslim leaders have drawn attention to this obscure film in a bid to divert attention from an uncomfortable political situation at home, but this doesn’t change the reality of great sensitivity on the street toward any perceived insult of Islam.
Two decades ago, most Arab and Muslim countries banned Martin Scorsese’s film, The Last Temptation of Christ, because the traditional values of these societies would not allow Christ, a revered figure in Islam, to be shown in a disrespectful light. Thus this is not an Islam-West clash, but a close encounter between traditionalism and non-traditionalism of the most uncomfortable kind.
To be clear, this is not intended to mean that Muslims do not care about individualist values or human rights as such, that traditionalism is inherently violent, or that Westerners reject outright all deference to religious symbols. But it is a fact that barely 50 years ago, before the West made its final break with the past in the post-Darwinian and Vatican II ambience of the decades following World War II, most of what is not tolerated in the East today would, by and large, not have been tolerated in the West either.
Yet there is undoubtedly a second dimension to what is unfolding before us at present. To many Muslims, the creation of Innocence of Muslims only confirms what they have suspected all along, particularly since the invasion of Iraq in 2003: that the Western world is waging a war against Islam itself. This is the reason that European embassies have become flashpoints in addition to American ones – protestors see the West more broadly, not just the United States, as the opposing side in this conflict.
Some individuals and groups have stepped forward to demonstrate the understanding needed to move forward. For instance, at a reception marking the Muslim holiday Eid ul-Fitr, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that “the United States rejects both the content and the message of [the] video . . . [and] any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others” – though neither she nor any other American has the legal right to ban it. And Imam Mohamed Magid, who leads one of the largest mosques in America, spoke out to condemn the violent protests – both in an address at his mosque, and to audiences in Egypt through satellite television, to whom he emphasised that vast majority of Americans reject the video in question as well.
As good citizens of our global and interconnected world, we must resist the tendency to stereotype or think apocalyptically. At the same time, responsible leaders everywhere must pro-actively discourage violence as well as hate speech in all its forms. We must all repeatedly do what we can to encourage respectful and rational choices.
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* Leena El-Ali is Vice President of Strategic Development at the international conflict transformation organisation Search for Common Ground (www.sfcg.org). This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Rumor Has It Journalists Can Help Clear the Air
Naoko Udagawa (far right) and SFCG staff in front of Ambon’s famous peace gong.
By Naoko Udagawa
“Ambon is like a paradise.” This is how a local Search for Ground Common staffer described the capital city of Maluku Province, in Indonesia. Despite the beauty of the Maluku islands and the region’s famed local seafood, ikan bakar, Ambon has been a conflict zone since 1999 when sectarian conflict between Muslim and Christian communities broke out. read more…
Anti-Union protests in Stone Town.
By Elisabeth Biber
Despite the recent joyful celebrations for Eid al-Fitr – the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting – the paradise archipelago of Zanzibar, with its “hamna shida” (“no worries”) mentality, seems to be preoccupied with bigger things. Boys in the street are playing as usual with their new Eid gifts, mostly plastic guns; yet, they are not just playing any game, they are running around the streets as ‘anti-riot police’ shooting at ‘demonstrators’ – simulating the re-occurring anti-union riots in Stone Town. Their playful calls for a “Sovereign Zanzibar” and an “End to the Union” are not the only signs for underlying tensions simmering on the Island. read more…
