Holding up a Mirror

Just in case some of you are still wondering what exactly it is that I'm doing in Egypt, I thought I would post an article that was written by the director of the program I work for and published at http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1156077795929&pagename=Zone-English-Muslim_Affairs%2FMAELayout#4.

The article shares a little of what we hope our students will learn, and what it is that we ourselves are still learning as well. It's a long piece, so if you only read one paragraph, read the one entitled "Children of Empire."

Walking in the Shoes of the Other
Mutual Perceptions and Uneven Realities
By David Holt

The Pew Global Attitudes Project released a report, The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other , June 22, 2006. American political scientist Dr. David Holt provides his personal reflections on the report's findings. Dr. Holt is the director of the Cairo-based Middle East Studies Program (MESP), sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) in Washington, DC. In the program, students from North American Christian universities spend a semester in the Middle East studying Islam, colloquial Egyptian Arabic, and the Arab-Israeli conflict; they travel throughout the region to places like Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories.

The recent Pew report on the negative mutual perceptions of Arab Muslims and Westerners toward each another comes as no surprise. In the current political climate, perhaps the results are inevitable. Yet attitudes change and remedies exist.
As director of a Cairo-based semester-abroad program that seeks to teach North American Evangelical Christian students to appreciate the people, religion, and culture of the Middle East, I will share some simple worldview assumptions that help our students understand the reasons for such negative mirror images, the degree to which they contribute to them, and their responsibility for positive change.
Most of the ideas below focus on getting students to first self-reflect — to know who they are before trying to understand the other. In this sense, our Muslim hosts provide a mirror into our students' own self-understanding.

Know Thyself
As products of culture, our students come with a lot of moral, political, and religious baggage given to them by their families, their communities, and their wider civilization. Like most people everywhere, they do not seriously reflect on how they arrive at their values or see serious tension between the self and society, perhaps the most basic tension in political life.
In this respect, life in a predominantly Muslim world, even for just a semester, offers students an incredible mirror with which to examine their own identities, values, and priorities. If the comforts of home in the West — friends, family, religious community, and schools — don't compel them to examine their lives and values, the stresses of life as unofficial ambassadors to Cairo certainly do. Here, they are forced to encounter Muslim views that are highly critical of Western culture, religion, political policies, and military agendas. For this, we are grateful to our Muslim friends who serve this vital role while at the same time demonstrating hospitality, kindness, and friendship.

Truth Is the First Casualty of War
This timely lesson explains much of the Pew report. At a time of cultural and literal war between Western allies and Muslim peoples of the Middle East, one is hard-pressed to find balanced images in the media. The history of propaganda machines during World War II demonstrates how easy it is to use communication technology as an instrument of distortion and death. In the current political climate, both societies are guilty of compromising the praiseworthy goal of media objectivity.
Our students see both sides. While in the region, they notice the stark contrast between persistent images of violence on Western TV — Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, the War on Terror — and the utterly normal life of ordinary Egyptians and other Middle Easterners. Random encounters with Muslims on the street and discussions arranged with Muslim peers during homestays or student-led meetings teach valuable lessons.
Whatever struggles our students have accepting Muslim culture, politics, or values generally, they cannot maintain serious hatred, disrespect, or disregard for those who have shown them kindness. While these relationships don't eradicate all prejudices and preferences, they offer a timely antidote to the usual wartime propaganda.
Another casualty of war, however understandable, is worth noting. Since our students study the Arab-Israeli conflict and meet with Palestinian youth as well as Hizbullah officials while traveling, it is obvious to them that there is little willingness on the part of Muslims to see Israelis, and perhaps Jews generally, as anything but instigators of the region's many problems.
There seems to be little willingness to explore the basis of Israel's vibrant economy, democracy, world-class universities, Nobel Prize-winning science and medicine, and some of the world's most advanced industry and technology as anything other than an import supplied by the great powers gained through the exploitation and abuse of Palestinians.
Even if a bit naive about Middle East politics when they first arrive, our students are always surprised to hear conspiracy theories about Israeli involvement in September 11, 2001 (9/11) from even the most well-educated Middle Easterners.

All Religions Look Alike
Most religious cultures have rules of behavior meant in part to earn rewards and avoid punishment in this life and the next. I always ask my students, "How is your religion different than this? Without comparing religious doctrines, can you find something wrong with Islam — religiously, socially, and politically — that wouldn't also apply to Christianity?"
I also insist that they avoid comparing apples and oranges: Don't compare the Muslim practice of jihad, for example, with Jesus's teaching of love; instead, compare the Muslim doctrine of jihad with Jesus's teaching and compare the Islamic practice of jihad with the Christian use of war, legitimate or otherwise, in order to better compare how religion has impacted our respective cultures. Compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges.
The fact is that our religions do produce different consequences within respective social, political, and economic contexts, but I first want my students to be self-critical before considering how difficult it is to make sophisticated comparisons that distinguish religious from non-religious causes of social and political life.

Children of Empire
This is my favorite piece of propaganda. I argue that, as young Americans, my students are free-riding on the fruits of empire without realizing it. Like most "children of empire" throughout history, they are relatively unaware of the extent to which war, killing, injustice, land grabs, ethnic cleansing, slavery, and other unsavory activities have served as a foundation for their well-being and lifestyles. In many cases, such deeds were done in the name of Christ and the Church.
For sure, the students are not thanking God for these evils when they echo genuine prayers of gratitude for the blessings of peace and security that elude so many peoples across the globe. Most of the students, in fact, don't make the connection between their relatively privileged status in life and the evils that inevitably accompany the rise of great civilizations, whether Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, or other. This is a dark lesson for peoples of all religious convictions to ponder. Is it possible to have a single dominant civilization, even within a region, without the practice of such things?
I tell my students that it is easier to talk about the love of Jesus once we have acquired our portion. Most of them, for example, oppose the Israeli occupation. I ask them provokingly, "Why can't Israel annex Palestinian land for its security if our ancestors displaced Native Americans and Mexicans on our march across the North American continent? Why aren't you Christian students protesting on campus to give back college properties once inhabited by some Native American group?"
For many reasons, including the absence of a military draft, our students can easily forget why they enjoy such security and prosperity while condemning the prevalence of violence in other cultures.
In the end, when my students express frustration from listening to Muslims complain incessantly about how they are misunderstood and disrespected by the West and its media, I remind them to ask themselves how they would feel if a Muslim nation invaded the United States, occupied our land, denigrated our religious beliefs, and while doing so, sent some of its prosperous, elite youth to study "(with)" us and ask for an audience to sit and talk about feelings, opinions, and perceptions. I suppose the answers they discuss among themselves would have much to do with their ability to comply with the first principle above — to know thyself.

Religion Versus Civil Religion
These two concepts help explain another basic tension of moral political life, even if it is more evident to Westerners than Middle Easterners due to the doctrine of constitutional separation of church and state.
What is the difference between them? Ideally, religion is a way of thinking and behavior that our students derive from Biblical training, much as, I would say, Muslim thought and behavior is derived from Qur'anic teachings. Our Christian students would like to think that their religious values inform their politics, rather than the reverse. But the moral flow is bidirectional. As herd animals most of our lives, we more often read and interpret sacred texts in light of political interest and necessity. Civil religion may be defined in relation to these core values and rules that guide the community.
Currently, the most powerful element of civil religion is the value of tolerance. As the Pew report suggests, Westerners judge their Muslim counterparts for violating this central pillar by denying many freedoms common in Western societies.
My students learn that, for Muslims, little or no tension may exist between these two ideas because Islamic political theory leaves little room for separation of church and state. While arguable on many grounds, the difference may not matter for purposes of learning.
I am concerned that my students ask themselves what the difference is between values derived from Biblical religion and those from the civil religion of their state. Why? Because, like their Muslim counterparts, they should be able to explain why so many well-intended, well-motivated people of all religions think and behave in such ungodly ways — is it because the God or gods they worship are evil? Before they criticize another culture or religion, I want my students to ask themselves how so much historical evil was done in the name of Christ.In more nuanced fashion, I want them to understand the tension between a simple Western civil-religious value like freedom and its Biblical meaning, however understood. Here, they may share much in common with their Muslim colleagues because both realize that although freedom is generally a positive idea, it is also used to justify the legitimacy of thinking and behavior that people of many religions consider immoral — abortion, pornography, lewd dress, public vulgarity, et cetera.
That my students are usually more than willing to accept such trade-offs rather than limit their freedom is one of the reasons that awareness of differences between true religion and civil religion are worth thinking about. Indeed, while freedom and true religion may, in fact, be compatible, the danger is that we take our personal or national interest in freedom as a marker for true religion in all cases.
Likewise, when we make true religion nothing more than an extension of communal interest, we corrupt our faith as well. Indeed, this is much the history of religion on earth.

Geography and History Matter
Where you live and the experiences you have often determine the menu of choices you face both as an individual and citizen. This is a point made by scholars such as Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. While most people don't like deterministic explanations of culture for good reason, we nonetheless need to be aware that some peoples are luckier than others in how they are placed on the planet. Even if the luck may not last forever, it is still true that our students will not face the kind of crises, insecurities, and other dilemmas faced by other peoples less fortunate in terms of location, natural resources, demographic composition, and linguistic barriers.
While scholars justifiably argue that culture — broadly, thinking and behavior — is still the real determinant of communal well-being, it is sobering to ponder the degree to which the location of our birth determines the kind of moral creatures we become. Egyptian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and even Israeli students' comments about the stressful impact of regional wars on their own lives often sound strange because our students are comparatively insulated from the kinds of regional and global threats that plague most peoples.
For precisely this reason, 9/11 shocked us.
But the issue of geography conveys another powerful truth — if my students were born in the Middle East, they would most likely be Muslims. In English, we have a saying: "The cradle determines the creature." While there are clearly cultural elements involved here, I don't let my students forget that what they consider as a matter of pride — their religion — may simply be a matter of fate. This is not the stuff from which to build theories of moral superiority.

Human Beings, Not Religions, Are Violent
It seems to me that whether people of a particular religion commit violence depends on contingent issues — history, geography, economics, politics, et cetera.
Among the three major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — each has a history both of using unjustified violence and the just war theory, which is designed to constrain it. This is one of the lessons of Ridley Scott's film The Kingdom of Heaven. None of us has a monopoly on the proper application of justice to the real world, and all of us know how to place religion in the service of violence when it serves our personal or national interest.

Empathy and Understanding Do Not Equal Agreement
This basic truth forms the basis for our time spent with Muslim friends throughout the region. In effect, our students learn the art of "dining with the opposition." Of course, like our Muslim hosts, our students maintain values and rights they believe are worth defending.
The institutional pillars of their civil religion — civil liberties, independent courts, scheduled and competitive elections, free press, due process, and so on — are not easily bargained away, even for the sake of some religious vision of truth. Yet, despite the cultural gulf separating us from people of the Middle East, the phrase above includes two student priorities: (1) Take the beam out of your eye before pointing to the speck in your brother's and (2) Learn what it is like to walk in another person's shoes.

* The views expressed in this article belong solely to Dr. David Holt and do not represent those of MESP or the CCCU.
David Holt has a doctorate in comparative politics from the University of Chicago. He is the director of the Cairo-based Middle East Studies Program, sponsored by the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities in Washington, DC. Dr. Holt has lived in Cairo and traveled throughout the Middle East for the last four years. His other academic interests include comparative religion and history. Your comments will be forwarded to him by the Muslim Affairs team.