However, as Obama clearly stated in his first interview as President with the Saudi channel Al-Arabiya: “People are going to judge me not by my words, but by my actions.” He is right, and so far his actions have generated some reason for optimism. Dosing Guantanamo Bay, dispatching experienced envoys to the Middle East and Afghanistan, opening channels with Iran and speaking directly to the Muslim world in terms of respect and mutual interest are all important steps that were never taken seriously by the previous administration. Ultimately, the Muslim world is looking to Obama for results.

Our lead writers, the veteran journalist Abdallah Schleifer, and Firas Ahmad and Arsalan Iftikhar, offer critical analysis and perspectives on how Muslims will perceive him and what he can do to address their concerns.

The domestic economic recession will no doubt occupy Obama’s agenda, but resolution of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict remains a critical issue. It holds the key to peace in the region. Israel’s shameful assault of Gaza that left over 1,300 dead, almost 500 of whom were children, was made possible by an absence of leadership from its biggest arms supplier and donor, the United States. Under the new administration, the US can and should broker a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians – anything less will undermine peace and security in the region. Two distinguished professors, Avi Shlaim and Mark Le Vine, describe here how Israel’s action contravened international law and how its belligerence must be restrained by the international community.

A central message of all revealed religions is to urge humanity to work toward peace. Unfortunately, today many religious com- munities find themselves at the heart of conflict. To address this reality, over 138 leading religious, political and academic figures, representing all major denominations of Islam, penned a his- toric document aptly titled “A Common Word”. The document received an incredibly welcoming response from the Christian community and is set to redefine Muslim-Christian relations for the years to come. Guided by two theological axioms, love of God and love of neighbor, it will provide the platform and framework for both communities to navigate through the seemingly intractable issues that affect them. Our dossier, which includes essays by Miroslav Volf, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Abdal Hakim Winter, and also an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, covers the various engagements between Muslims and Christians under the new Common Word initiative and the seminars that took place in 2008 at Yale, Cambridge and Rome.

With this issue of Islamica we return to publishing after almost a year’s absence stronger than ever, with new management and a distinguished board of directors. The current financial climate has hit the print media industry extremely hard. In 2008 Islamica won the DeRose Hinkhouse Awards in six categories including best religious magazine, and in December 2007 it was nominated by a leading US magazine, UTNE Reader, in its prestigious 19th Annual Independent Press Awards for best “Spiritual Coverage”. This is, for us, a timely reminder of the vital need to develop media spaces for Muslims to be able to articulate the best of their tradition and be an equal partner in the debates affecting the global community.

The Editor

CHURCH & STATE: ST PAUL AND CAESAR
On 12 May 2004, the political leader of a people gave a speech in which he outlined his conceptions of the state of “the West”. The next day, the religious leader of the faith that most of that people nominally adhere to happened to give a speech on a similar topic.

The first was Marcello Pera, the President of the Italian Senate. The second was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who soon after became the Pope of the Catholic Church.

The representative of the Church, and the representative of the State-coming together to register their concerns. The West is losing its roots… or perhaps its roots are rotting. And they will continue to rot, these representatives warn, unless the West renews its commitment to itself and rediscovers its identity. This book includes the aforementioned speeches (issued separately, coincidentally around the same time), and the subsequent correspondence between the two figures. It serves as an illustration of increasingly strong sentiments in today’s changing Europe.

THE FUTURE (DEMISE) OF EUROPE

For all its talk of “the West”, the book is really about Europe, and generally western Europe. Other parts of ‘the West’ do not warrant that much of a mention, and an essentialist description of that appellation remains unchallenged. The ambiguity of what “the West” denotes is not clarified, but to be fair, the authors expect the audience they speak to not to be unduly concerned with such scholastic niceties. The real point of their speeches and discussions is far more interesting.

The speeches have a very deliberate and well-articulated theme: Europe/the West has a particular historical heritage, which has defined its values. Those values have now been eroded by the behemoth of modernity, radical cultural relativism, and a loss of higher purpose. The solution? Europe must renew itself, on the basis of its pre-modern values that deserve to be championed, and regain its rightful standing in the world.

Otherwise, it is in danger of destroying itself, or of being destroyed.

ISLAM, MODERNITY, RELATIVISM AND THE EUROPEAN NARRATIVE

Europe does have a historical heritage that defines its values. Nevertheless, while historians have begun to recognize and admit that a great deal of that historical heritage is inseparable from Muslim contributions, Pera chooses to take another approach. Not only is Islam not a source of European culture and civilization, it is also the antithesis of it. Pera’s passionate writing unfortunately includes a great many inaccuracies regarding Islamic values, to the point that the educated reader wonders if he took the time to read much about Islam from (perish the thought) a normative Muslim perspective.

Cardinal Ratzinger does not say much about Islam in this book, except to make it very clear that it does not belong in Europe ; a theme he has followed in other works as well. But Pera is the one who is particularly fearful of the prospect that Europe will lose out, and that one day, through conversion or birth rates, it might become dar al-Islam (in his mind, a Muslim majority continent, although dar al-Islam technically has a very different meaning).

Other European authors have also made the point that the impact of modernity has not always been positive. Radical relativism, the absence of the sacred, and the elevation of humankind’s need to fulfill its greed have all been cited as reasons for the destruction of the world’s environment, the impoverishment of the exploited, and the breakdown of social cohesion. These are all issues that the authors of this book clearly share. Europe is not only a great power; it is one whose vitality is based on values, and those values are less cherished as time goes on.

The irony, however, is that many of the most incisive critiques of modernity and its effects in Europe on many levels took their cue from European Muslim authors, even if they did not do so consciously. A number of European Muslims in the early part of the 20th century made these claims and many more, but their critique is ignored in these pages. These were European patriots of the deepest commitment, but their contribution is unworthy-or at least, unwanted.

CREATIVE MINORITIES; WHAT ROLE WILL THEY HAVE IN EUROPE?

As noted, these discussions deserve to be taken very seriously. The issue of the future of Europe and the issue of Islam’s role in it are not minor concerns on negligible sections of European societies. These are issues that occupy the political elite and the grassroots; the left and the right; the religious and the secular. There is much talk in Europe regarding the “Muslim identity crisis”, but there is a greater identity crisis manifesting itself every day, and we need only open the newspapers to see. The Pope’s speech in September 2006 that so enraged the Muslim world was built on this theme, but few seemed to notice (see this author’s commentary in Islamica Magazine, issue 20).

There is a sense of hope as well in these pages: Pera notes that Cardinal Ratzinger recalls Toynbee ‘s idea of a “creative minority” that can revitalize a civilization in its twilight. Pera, a non-believer in religion in general, proposes that this creative minority be a non-denominational elite that respects Christianity as the root of Europe and its core. The irony escapes him that as a non-believer, his own intellectual pedigree is less solid in a Europe traditionally defined by sacred ideas than that of European Muslims. But in truth, his respect for Christianity is not a spiritual one; it is a recognition that any successful culture must have an absolute moral core, and he sees Christianity as the only possible core for a European identity that can emerge victorious against Islam. He does not stop to consider the question whether a European identity must be forged in contradistinction to Islam in the first place.

Europeans, as any other people, deserve the chance to renew themselves. They can choose to use the tools at their disposal to selectively enfranchise parts of themselves, while marginalizing others, both historically and presently-but it is unclear if that will bring any renewal. Or they can choose to use the tools to embrace the entirety of their own selves, putting an end to the European crisis of identity that so threatens it today, by balancing diversity with common purpose.

Without a doubt, they have the tools. History will judge them, both Muslim and non-Muslim, accordingly. One thing is hard to ignore at this juncture however: the future of Islam in Europe and the sustainability of its Muslim populations seems increasingly linked to the “what is the future of Europe” debate. It is certainly not a foregone conclusion.

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose 31 December report titled “Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report”, confirmed that the 19 June truce was only “sporadically violated”, and then not by Hamas but instead by “rogue terrorist organizations”. Instead, “the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement” occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on 4 November, allegedly after spotting them digging a tunnel, and then placed the entire Gaza Strip under even more intensive siege the next day.

IGNORING FACTS

According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European university study, this fits a larger pattern in which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 percent of all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second Intifada, compared with only 8 percent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.
Indeed, the Israeli Foreign Ministry seems to realize that this argument is losing credibility. During a conference call with half a dozen pro-Israel professors, the NY Consul General focused more on the importance of destroying the intricate tunnel system connecting Gaza to the Sinai. He claimed that such tunnels were “as big as the Holland and Lincoln tunnel,”, and offered as proof the “fact” that lions and monkeys had been smuggled through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two small cubs that were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on their way to a private zoo.

ISRAEL’S SELF-IMAGE

The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announced their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times (as did deputy political head Mousa Abu Marzook in a 6 January Opinion article), or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.

With each new family, 10, 20, and 30-strong, buried under the rubble of a building in Gaza, the claim that Israeli forces have gone group at the University College, Irvine, sent out an urgent email to the community explaining that, “Over the past week, increasing amounts of evidence lead us to believe that Hamas is largely responsible for any alleged humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

I have no idea who the “us” is that is referred to in the appeal outside of the membership of the group (which the President of Anteaters has assured me is in fact growing), but I am sure that the number of believers is shrinking. Indeed, one of the sad facts of this latest tragedy is that with each claim publicly refuted by facts on the ground, more and more Americans, including Jews, are refusing to trust the assertions of Israeli and American Jewish leaders.

TRAP

Even worse, in the Arab/Muslim world, the horrific images pouring out of Gaza daily are allowing preachers and politicians to deploy well-worn yet still dangerous and inciteful stereotypes against Jews as they rally the masses against Israel – and through it, their own governments.

What is most frightening is that the most important of Israel’s socalled friends, the American political establishment and the mainstream Jewish leadership, seem clueless to the devastating trap that Israel has led itself into – in good measure with their indulgence and even help. It is one that threatens the country’s existence far more than Hamas’s Qassam rockets, with their 0.4 percent kill rate; even more than the disastrous 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon, whose weakening of Israel’s deterrence capability in some measure made this war inevitable.

First, it is clear that Israel cannot destroy Hamas, it cannot stop the rockets unless it agrees to a truce that will go far to meeting Hamas’s primary demand – an end to the Gaza siege. Merely by surviving (and it surely will survive) Hamas, like Hezbollah in 2006, will have won. Israel is succeeding in doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts filled with rage and a need for revenge.

Second, Israel’s main patron, the United States, along with the conservative Arab autocracies and monarchies that are its only al- lies left in the Muslim world, are losing whatever crumbs of legiti- macy they still had with their young and angry populations. The weaker America and its axis becomes in the Middle East, the more precarious becomes Israel’s long-term security. Indeed, any chance that the US could convince the Muslim world to pressure Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons has been buried in Gaza.

Third, as Israel brutalizes Palestinians, it brutalizes its own people. You cannot occupy another people and engage in violence against them at this scale without doing even greater damage to your own soul. The high incidence of violent crimes committed by veterans returning from combat duty in Iraq is but one example of how the violence of occupation and war eat away at people’s moral center.

While in the US only a small fraction of the population participates in war; in Israel, most able-bodied men end up participating. The effects of the latest violence perpetrated against Palestinians upon the collective Israeli soul is incalculable; the notion that it can survive as an “ethnocracy” – favoring one ethnic group, Jews, yet by and large democratic – is becoming a fiction.

VIOLENCE-AS-POWER

Who will save Israel from itself? Israelis are clearly incapable. Their addiction as a society to the illusion of violence-as-power has reached the level of collective mental illness. As Haaretz reporter Yossi Melman described it on 10 January, “Israel has created an image of itself of a madman that has lost it.”

Not Palestinians, too many of whom have fallen prey to a similar condition. Not the “Quartet”, the European Union, United Nations, or Arab League, all of whom are utterly powerless to influence Israeli policy. Not the organized Jewish leadership in the United States and Europe, who are even more blind to what’s happening than most Israelis, who at least allow internal debate about the wisdom of their government’s policies. Not the growing progressive Jewish community, which will need years to achieve enough social and political power to challenge the status quo. And not senior American politicians and policy-makers, who are either unwilling to risk alienating American Jewish voters, or have been so brainwashed by the constant barrage of propaganda put out by the “Israel Lobby” that they are incapable of reaching an independent judgement about the conflict.

During the US presidential race, Barack Obama was ridiculed for being a messiah-like figure. The idea doesn’t sound so funny now. It is hard to imagine anyone less saving Israel, the Palestinians, and the world from another four years of mindless violence.

Lewis acknowledges the fact that Islam was an integral component of the great civilizational flourishing that took place in the Muslim world during the Middle Ages. He goes on to contend that the bifurcation of religious and secular authority in Europe and North America during the advent of modernity created a world where nations influenced by sociopolitical Islam were no longer viable. In short, he concludes that what made Islam great, the influence of religion in the public conscience, is what in part led to its eventual downfall. Lewis goes on to argue in his book The Crisis of Islam that Islam is at a civilizational crossroads, and Muslims have two choices. The first is to ” attributed all evil to the abandonment of the divine heritage of Islam and advocate[s] a return to a real or imagined past. The other way is that of secular democracy, best embodied in the Turkish republic founded by Kemal Atatiirk.” For Lewis, nothing short of a transformation of the Muslim world into the latter would ensure security for America at home.

Lewis’s ideas were important because of his eminent status amongst policymakers in Washington. His close relationships with neoconservatives like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are well noted. A 2004 Time magazine profile of Lewis explained that no other scholar had more influence on the decision to wage war in Iraq. The war was, in effect, a test of whether or not Lewis was correct in his diagnosis and prescription for what ails the Muslim world.
The dramatic failure of Lewis’s perspec- tive is best illustrated by comparing the status of two countries situated at the crossroads of the Middle East and Europe. On one hand there is Turkey, a nation that has made significant economic and politi- cal strides under Tayyip Erdogan and his justice & Development Party. While Erdo- gan enjoys support from a majority of Turks as evidenced by his landslide elec- tion, his administration must continue to tread carefully around the anti-religious military establishment, the guardians of the Atatiirk- style secular republic advocated by Lewis. Erdogan, a devout Muslim, is fashioning Turkey into a modern Muslim republic, the kind of nation capable of reconciling its Islamic heritage with the realities of the modern world.

On the other hand you have Iraq, a country plunged into civil war by the very interventionist force that Lewis argued would bring about democracy. In Turkey, Islam interacted with the modern world, resulting in mainstream Muslim leadership that respects both religion and the secular foundations of the state. In Iraq, external military intervention was used as a catalyst for reform, resulting in complete chaos. We would have all been better off had Lewis remained in his ivory tower.

US policymakers must abandon the Lewisian perspective. Given that Lewis was completely wrong in every policy recommendation his body of work formulated, it may be instructive for US policymakers to do that exact opposite of what he would argue. This would include recognizing that foreign policy has played an important role in the current political malaise of the Middle East and that Islam’s interaction with democracy does not necessarily result in medieval style governance.

What remains is the need to reconfigure how we understand the role of religion in Muslim politics. The vast majority of Muslims are not interested in a monolithic totalitarian religious state. At the same time, many want Islam to play a role in shaping the social, cultural and moral underpinnings of society. This is not something US policymakers should fear. Rather, it is something they should try and understand.

HUFFINGTON POST

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ON FAITH

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Produced jointly by Newsweek and Washingtonpost.com, On Faith features blogs from distinguished faith leaders such as Eboo Patel’s “The Faith Divide.”

In the Name of God, the All-Good, the Infinitely Merciful

and blessings and peace be upon the Prophet Muhammad and upon

all the messengers.

Your Holiness, Eminences, Excellencies, Distinguished Scholars: It is asserted by the Word of God, which for us Muslims is the Noble Qur’an, “And God summons to the Abode of Peace,” and by Christ (may peace be upon him) , who is the Word of God in Christianity and also a prophet and messenger of the highest order in Islam, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The goal of attaining peace is thus common between our two religions and we are here precisely with the hope of attaining peace between Christianity and Islam. Furthermore, what can be more important and foundational in the quest for peace than creating peace between our religions – for only from this peace will it be possible to establish peace between peoples and nations, more specifically the Islamic world and the West. Whether we are Christians or Muslims, we are beckoned by our religions to seek peace. As people of religion meeting here at the center of Catholicism, let us then dedicate ourselves to mutual understanding, not as diplomats, but as sincere religious scholars and authorities standing before God and responsible to Him beyond all worldly authority.

When one ponders over the remarkable similarities between Islam and Christianity, one wonders why there has been so much contention between the two religions over the centuries. As Muslims we share with Christians faith in the One God, the God of Abraham, and see in the beginning of the Catholic declaration of belief, credo in unum deum, the deepest confirmation of the first shahada or testimony of our religion, namely la ilaha illa’Llah (there is no divinity but God), which we consider to be foundational not only to our religion, but to every authentic religion. Our religion and yours share, therefore, the same foundation and basis despite differences among us in the interpretation of the doctrine of tawhid, or unity, that is so central not only to Islam but also to Christianity since the doctrine of the Trinity certainly does not negate Divine Unity in mainstream Christian theology.

Moreover, for us God is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, at once Transcendent and Immanent, as He is for you. Over the many centuries of our history men and women of our two communities have stood in awe before the majesty of God as Transcendent and felt His closeness as the Immanent, for as the Noble Qur’an asserts God is closer to us than our jugular vein. And there have been those in our two communities who have smelled the perfume of Divine Proximity, have become immersed in the Ocean of Oneness and been blessed by the beatific vision of God.

For both of us God has a personal dimension and we can address Him as the “Thou” to whom we both pray. For Muslims as well as Christians God is both Merciful and Just and the harmonization of these two apparently contradictory qualities has been the subject of countless studies by both your theologians and ours. And of course we both associate God with love with different interpretations of this central divine quality in our two religions. Christians speak of the love of God and some view Islam as lacking in emphasizing this quality. Muslims would respond that God being infinite, surely His love for His creation could not have become exhausted by the advent of Christianity. Some of that love must in fact have remained to be manifested in Islam and we, no less than Christians, live the life of faith in the glow of Divine Love. That is why one of the greatest spiritual masters of Islam, Jalal ai-Din Rumi, identified God with the Beloved, as did so many other Sufis, and could utter in a poem:

Hail to Thee O our Love with goodly passion,

O physician of all our ailments,

O remedy of our pride and honor,

O Thou our Plato and Galen besides.

Both you and we believe that God has created the human soul which is immortal and reject all those views that consider man as a clever machine brought about through accidental and haphazard biological events. We both associate human dignity with men’s and women’s eternal soul. Consequently we both emphasize the ethical character of human life and believe that having been given free will to act, we are responsible to God for our earthly actions. Our theologians may have debated about free will and determinism for many centuries but both religions have always insisted upon morality and the ethical nature of human actions with consequences beyond the grave. We all affirm the reality of good and evil and their basic distinction, without which belief in ethical action and its effect upon our immortal soul would be meaningless. And our ethical norms are in fact similar in so many ways. That is why we both seek to avoid what classical Catholic theology calls the seven deadly sins. That is why on the social plane we both emphasize the importance of the family and on the individual level the crucial significance of sexual ethics, which, although dealing primarily with the individual, has such a major impact upon society at large.

For both you and us it is our common eschatological beliefs, in their general principles and not details, that provide the framework for the religious understanding of human actions and their consequences upon our souls. We all believe in the reality of posthumous states, in various paradises, infernos and at least in the case of Catholic Christianity the purgatories. All of us expect to meet God and rely on His mercy and forgiveness. We even have fairly similar historical eschatologies with of course some differences, but in any case we both expect the second coming of Christ, who is at once the center of Christianity and such a major figure in the Islamic religious universe.

We Muslims and Christians, like followers of other religions, pray, and although the external forms are different, there are remarkable similarities in our prayers. Some of us say “O God forgive us our sins” and others astaghfiru’Llah, that is, “I ask forgiveness of God.” The life of the pious person, whether Christian or Muslim, is intertwined with prayer and both religions are witness to a vast spectrum of prayers from the simple petition to God for some need or want to the prayer of the heart, of the saints who only want “Thy will be done” or “I want not to want.”

Also over the centuries both Christians and Muslims have made pilgrimage and many continue to do so, Christians to such places as St James of Compostella, Lourdes, and in earlier Christian history Canterbury, and Muslims primarily to Mecca and Medina but also many other sites including Jerusalem which has been shared by both Muslims and Christians as a site of pilgrimage. Indeed, the external forms are different but how similar was and is the inner experience of pilgrimage in our two religions!

“How precious is the gift of faith!” Such an assertion can be made equally by a Christian and a Muslim. Whether one speaks of fides or iman, one is dealing with a most profound reality shared by Muslims and Christians alike. Moreover, both religious communities have encountered the relative significance of faith and works in their religious life. Remarkably enough every theological position taken in Christianity as a whole on the question of the relation and relative significance of faith and works has its equivalence mutatis mutandis in Islam.

Such is also true of the question of free will and determinism. Islamic thought is not confined to Ash’arism nor Christianity to Calvinism. It is false to assert that Islam is fatalistic and deterministic while Christianity is based on free will. In reality the rich theological and philosophical schools of both religions present a full spectrum of views on this crucial subject. Nor could this have been otherwise, for the followers of both religions experience in an immediate way, as do all human beings, their freedom to act. Yet along with Jews, they stand before the God of Abraham whose Will reigns supreme.

How strange that Muslims have been accused of being opposed to reason while it was a Muslim philosopher and jurist, Ibn Rushd or Averroes, who is considered to have been the single most important figure in the introduction of rationalist arguments into medieval Christian theology. The reality of the matter is that both Christians and Muslims have presented and held many diverse views concerning the relation between reason and faith or reason and revelation and practically every view in one religion finds its counterpart in the other, except that of course Islam did not encounter Enlightenment rationalism in the i8th century and did not surrender to its tenets as did certain strands of Christianity. In any case, persons of faith in both religions stand before the Majesty of God and His allpowerful Will as well as all-encompassing knowledge. And among them those who have had philosophical and theological tendencies have had to ponder over the relation between reason and revelation and have come often to similar conclusions. It is true that in Christianity God is a mystery hidden from man and in Islam it is not He who is hidden and a mystery but man who is hidden from God. And yet, the question of the relation between reason and faith, far from being a source of contention between the two religions, is a source of common accord if one considers the full spectrum of the traditional theologies and philosophies of Christianity and Islam.

Both religions having been sent by God to lead human beings back to Him, Christianity and Islam are channels of grace and make possible not only salvation but also the experience of sanctity as well as the attainment of inner illumination. The pious life of both religions has, through the centuries, been involved with the reality of sanctity in one way or another despite the eclipse of this dimension of religious life in recent times in both religions, in Western Christianity due to the advent of secularism and in Islam as a result of the rise of what has now come to be known as “fundamentalism”. One can only ask what the relation between Christianity and Islam would be if saints, men and women whose being are rooted in God, represented each religion in dialogue. In any case, the reality of sanctity as well as spiritual leadership, whether associated with an imam or a superior of a Catholic order are shared between us. In Shi’ism and certain schools of Sunnism, we speak of walaya which means spiritual power, sanctity and inner guidance. Surely Christians would find in this concept and reality deep similarities to their own doctrines.

It is also important to recall that both Islam and Christianity have created major civilizations with their own social structures, sciences, philosophies, arts, etc. Both have created sacred architecture of the highest order whether it be Chartres or the Mezquita in Cordova. Both have produced most outstanding examples of literature imbued with the values of the religions in question. Outward forms differ but the inner meanings of traditional Islamic and Christian arts and sciences – and not the humanistic and modernistic distortions of the traditional norms – are very close and should be a means of bringing the two religions closer together.

Speaking of Christian and Islamic civilizations, it must be noted that the name of both religions has been associated with violence in certain periods of their history. To associate only Islam with violence is to overlook the fact that over the centuries many more Muslims have been killed by Christians than Christians by Muslims. If there is more violence today carried out in the name of Islam than of Christianity, that is not due to the support of violence by one religion and opposition to violence by the other, but rather the result of the relative strength of each religion today. If Christianity in the West is no longer associated with violence, it is because of the weakening of Christianity before the onslaught of secularism. One could hardly imagine calling French or British soldiers to war these days in the name of Christianity, in contrast to older days from the Crusades to the destruction of natives in the Americas when Christianity being strong, was used oftentimes by political forces to legitimize wars and violence. To associate Islam simply with violence and Christianity with non-violence is to make virtue out of necessity. The task to confront and oppose violence in all its forms is in fact a task in whose realization both Muslims and Christians must work hand in hand.

When we ponder over what unites us, we are confronted with the issue of human dignity. The views of the two religions are indeed close in this crucial matter. Traditional and classical Christianity and Islam both believe in human dignity because as both religions have asserted “God has created man in His image” whatever different meanings we attach to the word “image”. Furthermore, God has breathed into us His Spirit and that is the origin of human dignity we both accept and the source of human rights. To base human rights and freedoms on humanistic, evolutionary and secularist conceptions of man is merely to espouse a position that is based on sheer sentimentality bereft of any theological foundation and opposed by serious theological thought, both Islamic and Christian.

These are but a few of the realities shared by us and you. Why then has there been such confrontation and opposition between Christianity and Islam? One must consider first of all the fact that Islam appeared after Christianity and from the dawn of Islam Muslims have had respect for Christianity as a revealed religion, and have protected the Christians living among them and as they continue to in sizeable numbers in several Islamic countries. In contrast Christianity preceded Islam and its mainstream religious thought did not accept and for the most part does not accept even now Islam as an authentic religion revealed by God and given the power to bring about salvation to its followers. There are also formal differences many of which were divinely ordained in order to keep the two religions distinct. Had not those providential distinctions existed, we would not be speaking to each other as followers of two religions today, both of which have not only survived but possess a global presence to this day, a situation surely willed by God for those of us who accept God as the Almighty whose Will rules supreme. Let us then turn to some of those differences.

Islam emphasizes above all else Divine Unity for, as the Noble Qur’an asserts, “Say God is One (ahad). Being the One, who is also the Absolute, God’s reality cannot be compromised by any relationality for that would imply relativity.; hence the Islamic rejection of the Trinitarian doctrine and the possibility of Divine Sonship. Christianity on the contrary emphasizes the Triune nature of God while like Islam accepting His Oneness. Likewise, the two religions differ in their account of the end of the life of Christ who plays such an important spiritual role in the Islamic religious universe as well as being the heart and center of Christianity. The question between the two religions that remains is the following: was Christ crucified or not? And the answer to this crucial question is not the same as far as Islam and Christianity are concerned.

On the social plane, Islam emphasizes the centrality of the Divine Law (al-Shari’a) whose main sources are the Noble Qur’an and the Sunnah or wonts of the Prophet of Islam while for Christianity the law of Christ is a spiritual law and in everyday affairs Christianity incorporated much of Roman Law and later Germanic common law. The result is different views concerning the significance of laws that govern human society. Likewise, on the social plane Christianity preached giving unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. This meant the complete separation of spiritual and temporal authority, although in practice after Constantine the two became intertwined resulting practically in a situation not very different from that of Islam which has never accepted the separation of the domains of God and Caesar. Today both religions struggle with this question but for different reasons.

When we come to the organization of religion we again detect important differences. In Catholic Christianity there is the ordained priesthood and only priests can perform certain ritual actions, especially the consecration of the Eucharist. In Islam every man is a priest and there is no religious hierarchy as we find in Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Even the hierarchy found in Shi’ism is not the same as that found in Catholicism and a Shi’ite, like his Sunni brothers, is a priest in being able to conduct all the rites of the religion from performing or leading the daily canonical prayers to leading the prayer for the dead.

What or who is the Divine Word? To this question a Christian would answer Christ and a Muslim the Noble Qur’an, although in certain schools of Islamic thought each prophet including Jesus has been identified with an aspea of the Divine Word. In any case, for Christians the body of Christ is the “container” of the Word, while for Islam it is the Qur’anic Arabic language which, as the result of the Islamic revelation, became by God’s Will the sacred language of Islam and the “container” of God’s Word. Christianity has had many liturgical languages, including, besides Latin, Aramaic, Greek, Russian, Slovanic and even Arabic which is thus the sacred language of Islam as well as the liturgical language of Arab Christians. This different understanding of the role of language in religious rites has had many significant consequences. Not only Arabs, but all Muslims, whether Malay, Indo-Pakistani, Persian, Turk or African, all having mother tongues other than Arabic, pray five times a day in Arabic, whereas in the West after nearly two millennia of the use of the beautiful Latin liturgy, it was put aside in favor of vernacular languages after Vatican II.

Many have said that for Christianity, Islamic teachings have been too close for comfort and there is what one might call family enmity towards Islam that Christianity has not had towards other religions, the case of Judaism being an exceptional one. Yes, Christians read in the Holy Bible about Noah, Abraham and Moses, all of whom along with many other prophets are also mentioned in the Noble Qur’an. Christians, especially Catholic and Orthodox, venerate the Virgin Mary and so do Muslims. For Christians, Jesus is the Son of God, who was born miraculously from a virgin mother and who performed of many miracles. For Muslims he is not the son of God but one of the foremost prophets dedicated to spiritual guidance, the prophet of inwardness, born miraculously of a virgin mother. Yes, Muslims also venerate Mary, the only woman after whom a chapter of the Qur’an is named. Moreover, they not only accept the virginal birth of Jesus as do Christians, but also affirm his performance of miracles. Despite differences, the similarities are great enough to have aroused suspicion and special enmity among many Christians against Islam even after the political threat of Islam to Europe had disappeared.

There are also significant differences between Islam and Christianity due to their very different encounters with modernism and secularism. Obviously in dealing with Christianity today, we Muslims are not confronted with St Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and the builders of the Cologne Cathedral, however real these dimensions of traditional Western Christianity might still be. Rather, we face a Christianity that bears the deep wounds of five centuries of battle with forces opposed to religion, from the secular humanism and skepticism of the Renaissance to the materialism associated with the 17th century Scientific Revolution and the subsequent secularization of the cosmos to the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment, to the historicism and evolutionism of the 19th century to the current post-modern critique of religious texts and the virulent atheistic attacks being made recently in the West against religion as such. Western Christianity has had to face such figures as Montaigne, Bayle, Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, all of whom were products of the West and not from a land far away as has been the case of Islam in its confrontation with such figures. Islam, moreover, did not experience various phases of modernism in a gradual manner as did Western Christianity, but experienced it rapidly and in quick order. Of course there are those in the West who claim that the problem is precisely that Islam did not experience in depth modernism and especially the Enlightenment to which Muslims would respond, thank God that this did not happen to us. Otherwise the number of Muslim worshippers performing the Friday prayers at the Sultan Hasan Mosque in Cairo would be the same as the number of Christians participating in the Mass on a Sunday at the St Sulpice Church in Paris.

In seeking to come together we must be fully aware of the differences created by the advent of modernism. Western Christianity has fought against but also in many cases surrendered to the foe as we see in the abandonment of the cosmos to a secularist science or the adoption of certain Marxist themes in some of the currents of liberation theology. As for Islam, its encounter with modernism has been confined to a short period. Within the span of a century Muslims have had to face the challenges of five centuries of European anti-religious thought. Their reaction has, therefore, been different from that of Western Christianity. Islam’s encounter with modernism has not produced an army of influential secularist thinkers, nor a strong wave against religion as we see in modern European history. But there have been severe reactions, sometimes unfortunately violent, to modernism throughout the Islamic world recently, resulting in what is called problematically in the West fundamentalism which, however, also has its equivalents in both Judaism and Christianity not to speak of Hinduism.

Let us understand the roots of our differences not only as based in scripture and tradition, but also as resulting from our very different experiences of modernism and secularism. Simple criticism of the other without understanding and empathy cannot bring accord despite all the elements common between Islam and Christianity to which some reference has already been made. We are situated in the same boat floating over very dangerous waters. The vilification of the other through accentuation of differences without deeper understanding of causes of these differences and disregard for all that unites us, especially the love of God and the neighbor, cannot but lead to our own perdition.

Forgetting and casting aside the remarkable accord on so many basic doctrines and values and exaggerating differences used often to bring about purposefully discord and opposition have characterized much of the history of relations between our two religions. As we now all stand at the edge of a precipice it is time to turn a new page and seek to come together in the bosom of Divine Love. Of course our coming together does not and should not mean the destruction of divinely ordained formal structures of each religion. You and us: we must in fact be able to continue our distinct religious lives without constant threat of the destruction of our faith from the other side before even embarking upon dialogue. That is why we Muslims oppose aggressive proselytizing which seeks to reward conversion with worldly advantages. We wish to preserve our religion, as do the Jews, who in 1988 passed a law in Israel banning religious proselytizing, as would Christians if they were placed in our situation. To be friends requires that we first exist as ourselves. The other must be respected as the other, not as potential material for conversion from the category of otherness. Yes, both Christianity and Islam envisage for themselves a universal message, but if we are to live together in peace, we cannot try to destroy the religious identity of the other at all costs, imposing what we consider to be our right on the other, and disregarding his right for self-preservation.

Our attitudes in this matter as in so many others will change if we realize not only theoretically, but also concretely, that we belong to the same family of religions, worshipping the same God. The great tragedies of the 20th century have helped to expand the usage of the term “Judeo-Christian”. It is now time to realize that we have to speak of “Judeo-Christian-Islamic” if we are to be honest, and also reverential towards Abraham, who is the father of monotheism. It was God’s Will that the Abrahamic tradition should be comprised of the three religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. You cannot sever bonds that have been forged by God. If we are to accept in our hearts, and not only diplomatically, that we are members of the same religious family (seen in the positive sense of family based on accord and not discord), then we must discourse with each other as family members and respect each other in every way without hatred and above the fray of family feuds. Our dialogues must not be based on suspicion, hidden agendas and duplicity, but on sincerity and honesty, which are so much needed in our world. We are not each other’s enemies, but members of the same divinely ordained family. Therefore, we should not try to destroy each other, but seek to vie with each other in goodness, as the Noble Qur’an asserts.

One might understand that a thousand years ago, when we both lived in a world impregnated by faith, some Christians might have called Muslims their enemies, and vice versa, although even then many Christians and Muslims lived as friends as can be seen in the long history of Christian communities in the Islamic world. In any case, we no longer live in a traditional world of faith and are confronting other enemies. We live in a secularist world in which religions are each other’s best friends. In any case, today our enemy, which in fact is common between us, is the materialistic, hedonistic, nihilistic and God-negating world-view that is so wide-spread, the world-view that negates the spiritual nature of humanity, denies the sacred and the transcendent, and seeks to shatter our hopes for a blessed life everlasting. We have much to offer to each other in the central battle between truth and falsehood. But the offer can only be accepted if we first recognize each other as friends and not as enemies.

In this effort to reorient ourselves toward each other, all of us, Christian and Muslim alike, can play a role. But there is no doubt that the main responsibility lies on the shoulders of religious leaders, thinkers and scholars, those whom we call ‘ulama’ in Islam. Those who are guides and trailblazers in religious matters must come forward and seek to bring about understanding to those in their own communities who hearken to their call. They should bring about further knowledge about the other whom they should present as friend, not enemy, to be loved and not vilified. And surely the carrying out of such a task on our part is one that is not always easy. It requires – besides the necessary knowledge – selflessness, honesty and truthfulness in conjunction with love and compassion.

We as Muslims from different schools of Islamic thought and countries have come together to extend to you our hand of friendship, seeking to meet you in God’s love, beyond all our theological differences and memories of historical confrontations. Surely we, who respect and love Christ as you do, can meet and come together under the banner of what he has stated to be the two supreme commandments: to love God and to love the neighbor. We can also seek to extend, often in harmony with each other, the border of the definition of neighbor to include not only you and us but the whole of humanity, and even beyond that the rest of God’s creation. As the Holy Bible asserts, “With God, all things are possible.” We submit to Him, and ask for His help and affirmation in carrying out this momentous task of meeting with you in friendship and peace under the banner of that common word that unites us. There can be no more blessed act in our times than the creation of deep accord between God’s religions, especially the two religions that have the largest numbers of followers in the world, namely Christianity and Islam. Indeed, God summons us to the Abode of Peace, and blessed are the peace-makers.

Let me define “everybody” – obviously the man in the street: taxi drivers, shopkeepers and their customers, security guards, habitués of a Cairo coffee shop in the shadow of the mosque of Sayyidna Hussein, my Egyptian colleagues at the American University, waiters, my tailor.

Nearly all are delighted that Barack Hussein Obama won – with a big flourish for those who invoke his middle name, though curiously enough and encouragingly (from an anti-sectarian point of view), few do mention his middle name. For most he is simply “Obama”.

Obama, as the litany goes, “understands us”, the “us” being implicitly Egyptian, Saudi, Jordanian, to a lesser degree Palestinian, and beyond to the greater Muslim world and even explicitly the entire developing world. Many will suggest that is because “he is one of us” – his father, everyone knows, was an African Muslim, and the better read know that his stepfather was an Indonesian Muslim. They also, by and large, know that he is a Christian and no one, a New York Times op-ed column during the campaign to the contrary, thinks of him, much less condemns him, as an “apostate”.

In fact the attention paid to this election campaign by everyone but obviously most intensely among the educated, who were particularly sensitive to the relevant issues involved (the end of the American occupation in Iraq, an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, a deescalation of regional tensions with Syria and Iran) with an incredibly obvious undercurrent of enthusiasm for Obama is unheard of in the 39 years I have spent in and out of Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.

The closest I can recall to such mass enthusiasm for an American president was the extraordinarily positive popular emotions at the time of Nixon’s visit to Cairo in 1974. Mind you, Nixon was about to be impeached, his standing in America at a terrible low, but that was irrelevant, if even known. Here in Cairo he was the beneficiary of popular optimism – the Egyptian army had redeemed national honor only months earlier, storming across the Suez Canal to raise the flag over the Bar Lev Line, Israeli prisoners taken during the first spectacular days of the war, actually paraded through the streets.

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s man in the Middle East, had secured an Israeli pull-back; the Russians (with their very bad street rep for tipping poorly along with their presumed atheism) had been expelled by Sadat, and now the prosperous, successful Americans, obviously impressed by Arab valor and the possibilities of economic opportunity, would put an end to this miserable ArabIsraeli conflict in which so many Egyptian lives had been lost (in the wars of 1948, 1956, above all, 1967 and 1974, far more lives than the Palestinians, or for that matter any other Arabs had been called upon to give) according to an undercurrent at the time, of popular opinion.

Of course it was a terrible misreading that would result, along with many other disappointments, in disillusionment and, in much more recent years, deep dislike for the American government. But by and large, Egyptians, like other Arabs but even more so, always have differentiated between the government in Washington and the American people, so that extraordinary dislike of the government and its policies in general, and George W Bush in particular is only manifest in conversation and opinion polls and American tourists could forgivably be unaware.

As for the journalists, most are optimistic about the new administration, some emphatically, many cautiously. But those who dissent from the popular mood do so quite typically because they know more than the man/woman in the street, but not nearly as much as they could, if there were a tradition of serious investigative journalism, even via secondary sources and at that fairly easy these days with Google at hand in a culture where opinion trumps fact-finding all too often.

So all too frequently many journalists know just enough to get it wrong.

It is these dissenting journalists who know about APAIC and Obama’s invocation of standard American mantras that reassure a pro-Israeli public opinion that is not limited to the American Jewish community. Most Americans are causally pro-Israeli. As for the Christian Zionists, who are by no means “most Americans” but who number in the many millions, they are far more fanatic in their commitment to Israel than most American Jews – most of whom favor two state and a peace settlement that is anathema to the typical Christian Zionist who has a theological stake in a Middle Eastern apocalypse. The leadership of the American Jewish community and particularly of AIPAC (which tends to be far more hardline than the community as a whole) had good reasons to be worried about Obama – his call for direct negotiations without conditions with Iran and Syria much earlier in the campaign, his past expressions of concern for the fate of the Palestinians under occupation, his friendship, while a faculty member at the University of Chicago, with the brilliant Palestinian scholar Professor Rashid Khalidi (who happened to have PLO associations dating back to the eighties,) a friendship thrown in Obama’s face by the McCain camp in the final weeks of the campaign, and a wide range of advisors, official and unofficial who constitute a spectrum that includes respectable yet very serious critics of US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians. Some were distanced from the campaign when it became clear last Spring that the American Jewish vote, a bastion for the Democratic Party since the 1930s , was dangerously up for play, with pro- McCain campaigners and right-wing bloggers stressing Obama’s middle name “Hussein” and the stealth campaign that he was a Muslim, and by that definition, pro-terrorist, which even by election time still had about 18 percent of the electorate convinced.

One has to read someone like Joel Mowbray, a neo-conservative, pro-Likudist columnist, who covered the AIPAC conference , remained worried about Obama and no doubt voted for McCain (I hope I am not doing Joel an injustice) – to realize that it was the younger members of AIPAC – the rank and file at the annual meeting, who accepted Obama’s homilies as adequate and were swept up by his powerful and elegant rhetoric and his charm, as most educated younger American voters were, who prevented the older and more committed pro-Likud leadership from confronting Obama.

The Jewish vote, concentrated in a few key states like New York, California, Florida and Pennsylvania, has been a bastion of support for the Democratic Party since the 1930s and in the spring of 2008 it looked like significant numbers would defect to the Republicans if Obama got the nomination sufficient to cost the Democrats at least Florida and Pennsylvania.

The dissenters in the Arab press appeared to be oblivious to a monstrous campaign that involved the massive distribution in October to an estimated 28 million Americans, concentrated in the swing states including Florida and Pennsylvania, as well as Virginia, and Colorado, of a documentary, Obsession, produced by a mysterious foundation (The Clarion Fund) whose leaders are employees of Aish HaTorah International, a well-funded, Jerusalem-based Israeli organization associated with the most extremist and fanatical Israeli settlers, and whose websites indicated that whoever opposed “radical Islam” had to oppose Obama and support McCain. While the documentary, whose production and above all mass distribution is estimated to have cost $50 million, initially notes that most Muslims are not violent, by the end the indictment of radical Islam has shifted to imply complicity of the religion itself with terrorism. Even before the mass distribution, hundreds of thousands of copies had been sent to Jewish organizations and various Jewish Republican groups openly promoted the film.

In the end Obama turned the tide: his own well-organized and massive counter-disinformation campaign among American Jews, his continuous declarations of support for Israel’s security, his distancing himself from those advisors most troubling to the Israel Lobby, and McCain’s appointment of Sarah Palin, whose racist-populist remarks about True Americans (Republicans) frightened many American Jews with a reasonable fear of any whiff of fascism, averted massive defections. The Jewish vote remained firmly in the Democratic camp despite President Bush’s historic accomplishment as the most pro-Israeli American President since the establishment of the state of Israel.

Arab journalists who have dissented from the popular mood have also been troubled by some of Obama’s appointments, most notably the appointment of Congressman Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff. Emanuel’s father is Israeli and suddenly rumors swept across many Arab, Muslim and left-wing websites about Emanuel, who as Rashid Khalidi recently noted, is a tough, very effective politician, architect of the Democratic Party Congressional victory in 2005, and is very pro-Israeli. But as Khalidi also noted, as chief of staff, Emanuel has little or no influence on policy. When Emanuel’s father was quoted in the Israeli press, slurring Arabs, Emanuel disassociated himself and condemned his father’s remarks.

Jim Zogby, who heads up the Arab American Institute and is probably one of the most effective, politically engaged Arab American community spokesmen, responded in still greater detail, refuting the rumors: Emanuel was not an Israeli national nor a dual national, he did not serve in the Israeli armed forces (the IDF), he was not fired from the White House in 1988 for being part of a Mossad plot (along with Monica Lewinsky) to spy on then-president Clinton. Zogby also notes that Emanuel is “a strong supporter of Israel”. But Zogby asks, “How many members of Congress are not?” Zogby finds the rumors about Emanuel “as reprehensible in their own way as the ‘Barack Obama is a secret Muslim/Manchurian candidate’ tale or the anti-Arab anti-Muslim canards to which I and many of my colleagues have been subjected over the years.”

What matters for Zogby is this: “Emanuel is Jewish and his father is an Israeli. Arab Americans should be especially sensitive to attacks on anyone based on religion or ethnicity. He (Emanuel) has worked closely with and is liked by the Arab American Members of Congress from both parties, and he was the architect of the 1983 White House lawn signing ceremony for the Oslo Accords that brought Arab American and American Jews together. When in 1984 Emanuel accepted my invitation to a luncheon with Arab American community leaders, those who met him were impressed by his openness and honesty.” ‘

I gather that in contrast to some of the Arab journalists, the Arab heads of state are overwhelmingly pleased by the election results, and particularly by the calculated initiatives and the calm and wellmanaged way Obama conducted his campaign. But few would go on record prior to the inauguration out of respect for the presidency. However, Egypt’s President Mubarak did inform the senior editors of the government newspapers, in a briefing just after Eid, that relations between Egypt and America would improve dramatically when the new administration takes over.

President Mubarak, along with Syria’s late President Hafez alAsad, was a key ally in the American-Arab Alliance that forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait in 1991, but he opposed the invasion of Iraq, predicting quite accurately that an American invasion would result in chaos and stimulate terrorism. Obama’s opposition to the invasion, and his intention to end the occupation as quickly as possible, have all been quietly welcomed by the Arab leaders.

Much is to be made of Obama’s appointments. But what of policy? David Ignatious, deputy managing editor of The Washington Post, says: “Obama wants to make an early push on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, despite political turmoil in Israel. He has learned from watching Presidents Clinton and Bush that you can’t wait until the eleventh hour to be an active mediator. On Iran Obama wants to open the door to a process of engagement and dialogue even though his advisers aren’t confident it will succeed. They think Iran may not yet have found the language of ‘yes’ but that’s no reason not to explore areas of possible mutual interest.”

Back in July 2007, when the possibility that Obama might beat front-runner Hillary Clinton for the nomination and then go on to win the election was barely conceivable, Obams sought a meeting and advice from former national security adviser Zbigiew Brezezinski, an establishment figure who has been vilified by the Israel Lobby for his criticism of US policy towards the Middle East. Brezezinski came away from that meeting deeply impressed and he became an informal Obama adviser. He remained “informal” precisely because of his pre-election political liability.

Although Rashid Khalidi warned his predominantly Egyptian authence at the American University in Cairo last December not to expect too much too soon given the incredible domestic crisis that Obama must deal with, and particularly since domestic crises, Khalidi points out, will always be paramount to any successful politician which Obama very much is. But Igantius still insists that Obama wants to make an early push on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Certainly the Arab leadership hopes and even expects that he will move accordingly and the opinion piece contributed by one of Saudi Arabia’s most articulate statesmen, Amir Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to Washington and London and former director of Saudi Intelligence, that appeared in the 26 December edition of The Washington Post, makes that very clear . Writing about “Peace for the Mideast; How Our Plan Could Aid Barack Obama’s Efforts”, Prince Turki notes that Obama inherits a “Middle East that is sick with discord”, but that there are reasons to be optimistic. “If Obama joins with forces for peace and stability and acts boldly, his presidency could have a marked impact on world affairs.”

Turki offered as a prescription for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Saudi-inspired Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 endorsed and more recently re-endorsed by all the Arab states. Before laying down the well-known Unes of that initiative, Prince Turki quickly reviewed the history of the problem and pulled no punches: that the establishment of Palestinians “the Catastrophe” in which the dream of an independent, Arab Palestinian state and the principle of self-determination were shattered.

It is easy for those distant from the problem to dismiss this as “old history”, but it must be intellectually and emotionally assimilated if Americans and Israelis are to grasp why, in Turki’s mind, and the mind of all Arabs, the recognition of the state of Israel as a legitimate state, and the normalizing of relations, which the Palestinians did at Oslo, is considered “a high price for peace.”

Moving to the 1967 War and its aftermath, Turki observed that there is universal agree- ment that the Palestinian people are under occupation and have been deprived of their land. He considers the Olso Accords of 1992 a “turning point” – the first direct agree- ment between the Palestinians and Israelis. “There was a true spirit of cooperation expressed through the mutual desire of Israelis and Palestinians to live together in peace. The assassination of Yitrhak Rabin in 1995 tragically ended this hopeful development.” Turki noted that since the failure of Oslo, the waves of violence and counter-violence has been almost as predictable as the tides.

In return the Arab Peace Initiative calls upon Israel to withdraw completely from the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem (which would become the capital of a Palestinian state living peacefully side by side with Israel), and to accept a just solution to the refugee problem according to UN General Assembly Resolution 194. It is significant that the Arab Peace Initiative talks about a “just solution”, and not about an absolute Right of Return.

Is it conceivable that Obama and his policy advisers will respond positively to the Arab Peace Initiative? Well ,why not? Israel’s President Shimon Peres, who back in the 1960s was a hawk, has declared that he is prepared to talk anywhere with any Arab leader about the peace initiative and Prime Minister Olmert, once a man of Likud and disciple of Sharon, has, at the very end of his leadership, basically endorsed the Initiative.

One could argue that Israeli military superiority, and the intransigence and arrogance that has accompanied that superiority, has accomplished little more than stimulating and justifying the rise of Hamas and the immense popularity in the Arab world of Hizbollah. An increasing number of Israelis, at least among the elite, have come to recognize this.

And one might add that the past eight years of failed American Middle Eastern policy characterized by President Bush honoring Sharon as “a man of peace” and the growing recognition, in America as well as in Israel, that contrary to the Bush administration’s take on the region, it is the settlements which today stand as the major obstacle to peace.

People learn and change. And when they do that affects policy. Late last September, after more than a year and a half of deliberation and staff consultations, 34 Americans, characterized as the Leadership Group of the US-Muslim Engagement project, and convened by two leading conflict resolution organizations in America, issued its nearly 150-page policy report, “Changing Course: A New Direction for US Relations with the Muslim World.” The report, which includes a seven-page executive summary, which was presented to the Congressional Foreign Relations Committee where it promptly secured the endorsement of the Committee chair, Representative Howard Berman.

The premise of the report is that “creating partnerships for peace with Muslim countries and communities is one of the greatest challenges – and opportunities – facing the United States today. Currently conflict, misunderstandings and distrust plague US relations with Muslims in many countries, imperiling security for all. Despite these tensions, the vast majority of Americans and Muslims around the world want peace, amicable relations, good government, prosperity and respect. Policies and actions – not a clash of civilizations – are at the root of our divisions.”

The 34 Americans who signed on the report are a most diverse and bi-partisan group. They include 11 American Muslims of the group, a presence that reflects the report’s belief that American Muslims can be a bridge in the reconciliatory policies and projects proposed in the re- port. (Disclosure: I am one of the Muslim members of the group.) Among members are former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, Richard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell; former US Undersecretary of Defense Dov Zakheim, former US Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, two former Republican Con- gressmen, a Catholic Bishop, Ingrid Mattson, head of ISNA – the largest Muslim organization in America; Faisal Abdul Raouf, author and imam of a New York mosque engaged in global interfaith work as well as Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum Institute, Ziad Asali, president of the American Task Force on Palestine, and Thomas Dine, former Executive Director of AIPAC.
The report takes note of the conditions that enable a tiny minority of Muslims involved in violence to recruit, operate and inflict harm by drawing on more widespread set of active or passive supporters, that Muslims consider America to be complicit in those conditions. And that Muslim anger is compounded by the sense that the US has favored Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians, and exercised a double standard on the development of democracy in the region. The report goes on to advance four detailed goals: resolving conflicts through diplomacy; improving governance in Muslim countries without taking up a partisan role; promoting broad-based economic development in Muslim countries and regions; and building mutual respect and understanding. 2

The most immediate call for action is for President Obama to spotlight the critical importance of improving US-Muslim relations in his inaugural address, to reaffirm a US commitment to prohibit all forms of torture, to initiate serious negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in the first 100 days of the administration, and to engage Iran diplomatically during the same period.

Members of the Leadership Group and among the public endorsers include members in Obama’s transition team and the report has been circulating at the highest levels of the new administration. In December, in an exclusive interview with The Chicago Tribune, Obama described his presidency as an opportunity for the US to reboot its relations with the Muslim world, starting the day of his inauguration and continuing with a speech he intends to deliver in an Islamic capital during the first 100 days.

One old time-Egyptian observer of regional politics read that story as well as “Changing Course” and said, “Now’s the time for the Arabs and the Muslims to come out aggressively for peace and for new and better relations with a new and better administration in Washington DC. We have to meet Obama half-way.

This money quickly flowed from commercial banks to US consumers in the form of easy access to all kinds of credit: home mortgage credit, home equity credit and what seemed to be a never-ending supply of consumer credit cards. The Federal Reserve’s easy money policy was intended to spur domestic spending, and was in fact extremely successful: from the third quarter of 2001 to the third quarter of 2008, consumer spending increased from $7.06 trillion to $10.19 trillion. This last number meant that consumer spending represented 70.6 percent of the US Gross Domestic Product. The increase in consumer spending also amounted to approximately 75 percent of the increase in the US GDP from $10.1 trillion as of the third quarter of 2001 to $14.4 trillion as of the third quarter of 2008. Interest rates continued to be low throughout the first decade of this century – even after the Federal Reserve began to increase short-term rates – because of the willingness of foreign investors, particularly countries such as China which enjoyed a large trade surplus with the United States, to invest those surpluses in US government bonds rather than, for example, increasing consumption in their own countries. (The Chinese, for example, save 40 percent of their net income, while Americans have, for the last few years at least, had a negative savings rate.)

Despite the substantial increase in con- sumer spending throughout this period, in- come of US households was flat. Americans could continue spending, despite the fact that their incomes were not increasing, because they felt they were richer: house prices were appreciating rapidly and so were Americans’ stock portfolios. In hindsight, much of this appreciation was attributable to the easy credit that stimulated demand, with the result that prospective purchasers overpaid for homes, and firms were able to generate excess profits driven by what appeared to be insatiable consumer demand.

Yet it was only when Wall Street got involved in the home mortgage market that what could have been viewed as only a real estate bubble metastasized into a threat to the entire financial system. From the perspective of Wall Street financiers, real estate was the ideal collateral: the risk of default was historically very low, and recovery rates were very high because there was little risk of deprecation in the real estate market. This led to the spread of mortgage-backed securities, bonds that were issued by entities that owned “pools” of home mortgages. Advances in computing technology allowed Wall Street financiers to devise ever more complex structures for these securities, with the result that more and more investors became involved in real estate finance. This in turn led to further availability of home mortgage credit, with the result that further impetus was given for housing prices to appreciate. Most importantly, however, mortgage backed securities, because they were often rated AAA by ratings agencies, attracted banks as investors. Because federal banking rules permitted banks to treat AAA-rated securities as the equivalent of cash holdings, banks could essentially loan out $9 for every $1 of AAA-rated mortgage backed securities they held. Because many banks purchased large quantities of these mortgage-backed securities, the health of the banking system became, to a significant extent, tied to the health of the real estate market.

Wall Street was not concerned, however, because based on historical models, the chances of a market-wide collapse in real estate prices was deemed too small to take into account. These models, however, did not take into account the nature of the new loans that were being made in the last years of the housing bubble. By 2006, if not earlier, all the traditional home purchasers were already in the market. The market could only grow if segments of the population that had been excluded from the lending market became eligible to borrow. Thus, the last and most deadly wave of “innovation” in home mortgage financing was introduced – the so-called “sub-prime” borrowers.

The only way many of these new borrowers could afford a mortgage was for the mortgage to be structured in a way that minimized their financial exposure in the early years, on the hope that the loan could be refinanced in the future at a time when the borrower either had increased income or the price of the home had appreciated. Accordingly, purchasers could obtain 100 percent loan-to-value mortgages, i.e., they were not required to put down anything as a down-payment; they could obtain floatingrate mortgages which would allow them to take advantage of the historically low interest rates of the period, but would crush them once interest rates began to appreciate; purchasers could obtain interest-only mortgages whereby their monthly payments were only interest and none went to pay down principal; and, there were even “negative” amortization mortgages, whereby the borrower would actually go further into debt for the first couple of years of his ownership. Such loans could only be made because investors were willing to purchase bonds secured by large numbers of such loans, the belief being that while such loans would be risky on their own, once aggregated into a pool, the risks of default would be minimized.

Unfortunately, this optimism proved to be unfounded. Once interest rates began moving up, many of these borrowers could not afford the increased monthly payments. To make matters worse, because interest rates were going up, housing prices peaked, and it was no longer an easy matter to sell one’s home.

Once it became clear that many of the sub-prime loans would default, banks recognized that they would lose money on their purchases of mortgage-backed securities. Because these securities were part of their capital, this meant that they would have to restrict the availability of loans. The inability of banks to make loans in turn exacerbated the decline of housing prices, as buyers could not come up with the funds necessary to purchase ahorne, thus necessitating further declines in home values.

But this led to further losses in the value of the mortgage-backed securities held by the banks, leading to further pressures to restrict credit. As a result, interest rates today on a 30-year mortgage are slightly more than 5 percent greater than the federal funds rate. For a 30-year jumbo mortgage, the spread is even greater: 6.33 percent. This indicates that banks are hoarding cash, something that does not augur well for a quick recovery in the US housing markets.

The ill effects of this credit crisis are not limited to housing, however. Because of the huge losses banks have suffered as a result of the housing bubble, they literally have no money to lend to anyone. In many cases, this means that firms which had not arranged for a line of credit prior to this cri- sis will not be able to obtain a new one, and for firms that have a line of credit, banks will only agree to renew it on strict conditions and at a substantially higher cost if they are willing to renew it all. Even that most funda- mental of credit instruments – the letter of credit – which is used to finance almost all international trade is now feeling the effects of the credit crisis as goods are piling up in international ports because exporters are unwilling to accept the letters of credit pro- vided by the importers as payment for the goods. Because each one of these crises is tied to the overall system of providing cred- it, only a systemic solution resolving the basic solvency of the credit system has any chance of bringing a halt to the negative economic spiral the world economy is now experiencing. And while US taxpayers are no doubt in shock over the $700 billion price tag for the US Treasury’s “Troubled Asset Repurchase Program”, it is unlikely that this represent all the funds that will ultimately be needed to stabilize the finan- cial system. The United States has been addicted to cheap credit for almost a decade and now that it is suddenly gone, it is unlike- ly that the consequences will be anything less than dramatic. No one should expect a quick recovery. It might take years before banks recover their losses and begin provid- ing credit again at a level that approaches what in a prior time had appeared to be “normal”. It will be years before the US consumer has paid off the substantial bills he incurred to finance his lifestyle. One only hopes that the least well-off members of the global economic system – the developing world – will be able to survive this global recession without the benefit of being able to export their goods to US consumers. In the long run, we will all be better off if they spent more of their wealth investing in the good of their own societies rather than subsidizing consumption of their products in developed markets.

Some Muslims mistakenly believe that if only the global financial system operated according to the model of Islamic finance, these problems could have been avoided. Sadly, I do not put much weight in such claims. Islamic finance is basically a kind of structured finance, just like the mortgagebacked securities that were at the heart of this crisis in the US. In fact, it is probably the case that many Islamic “bonds”, i.e. sukuk, will suffer losses as the real estate bubble in the Persian Gulf pops (unless various governments in the region intervene to protect investors, which they will probably do). Structured finance, by definition, is vulnerable to asset-bubbles because it explicitly provides credit based on the perceived value of the collateral. If collateral is overvalued because of a bubble, then too much credit will be provided against that collateral, whether in the conventional system or the Islamic one. This is not the time for fingerpointing, or worse, some kind of schadenfreude (glee at another’s misfortune). The entire world is threatened by this crisis, even those countries that never enjoyed the direct benefits on the upside of the US housing/credit/consumption bubble. Hopefully Muslim countries, along with all other countries of the world, can cooperate in fixing the global weaknesses that led to this crisis. While no one can know for sure what changes will be made in the global financial system, there can be little doubt that by the time of the next US presidential election in 2012, the global economic system will have undergone substantial changes, hopefully for the better.

Selemani cupped his hands over his eyes and peered through the dust-mottled windows and saw blue vinyl seats ripped apart, their springs poached by stealthy night visitors, and splatters of rotten fruit and baboon droppings.

The dashboard was gone, as was the steering wheel. He tried the passenger door; it opened, and the smell of stale air and dried ordure swelled out before he could think twice and close it.

“The engine’s gone,” Lemi remarked.

“Nothing in the back,” added Julius.

“Ati. We’re too late.” Selemani put his hands on his hips and stuck his jaw out thoughtfully. “What about the roof?” He looked at Julius, who looked at Lemi, who looked down at his stick forlornly. His limp right leg flopped around it like a creeper. “Julius, you’re lazy. Get up on the bonnet and look at the roof.”

Julius gave Selemani a long stare, bearing no hurt or discomfort at all. It wasn’t even vacant; it was like he was looking at a fascinating painting that couldn’t look back. Selemani hated that look.

With an irritable cluck, Selemani shook off his flip-flops and hopped up onto the bonnet of the dilapidated truck. It was a neat view; hardly anything to be seen but moist fields of tea and a few little plots of banana palms grouped around dog-rib houses of the same raw sienna as the earth they were built from. The mountains stood in a shaggy crescent over to the west, like cloths hung crookedly from a washing line, striped horizontally with staggered terraces and steaming with condensation from the clouds they drew in.

Selemani scrutinised the roof. It was nearly rusted through in one or two places, but on the whole it was spectacularly broad and long, and only slightly convex. It would be big enough, for sure.

At that moment a woman’s yell came faintly from the direction of the village. Lemi craned his neck. “It’s your mother,” he told Selemani. Julius shrieked with laughter. “She’s got that girl round, hasn’t she? The one you’re marrying.”

Selemani ran an appreciative palm over the surface of the truck’s roof, pretending to be absorbed by its rough corroded rosettes. They seemed to make a pattern like the moon in those photos framed over the bar in The Savannah Club. Jamani, the things those white men got up to.

“Selemaaaaaniii!” the voice screeched again. “You’re wanted!”

“We’ll come back tomorrow,” Selemani announced, as if the moment had spurred him to take the decision, and he dropped back to the ground and worked his flip-flops back on with his toes.

The three started back toward the village, meandering through the thin streets of the outskirts with the piles of rotting rubbish and corrugated tin shacks, past the circular TANU meeting spot still not repainted even though TANU became the Revolutionary Party CCM last year – opulated as ever by elderly men with rumpled white embroidered hats and serious mouths, arguing over politics and getting hot under the collar, then sitting down and thinking for long stretches.

The three separated at the marketplace, less a square and more a rhombus bordered by cinnamon trees and whitewashed shops with wooden shutters and padlocks and hand-painted signs. Julius headed south to the far edge of the town near the school. A school and a clinic, that was modernisation. Government-paid nurses in crisply starched uniforms taking blood samples and distributing quinine.

This was one of the pioneer towns; not founded by pioneering homesteaders travelling West, but by the state, inspired by Lenin, funded by Russia and China, determined to lift Africa out of grinding poverty and into the free market. The village had swollen from a cluster of houses built by a stream to a town, a proper town, with public amenities and a registered electorate, all by government decree. Some households were ordered to move 50 feet to come into accordance with the new regulations. Almost everyone who used to live in the scattered cottages nearby now had to walk much farther to reach their plots of land every day. But this was progress. One day this village would be rebuilt in stone and have a bowling alley and a paved market square, and all the streets would be cleaned by professional, government-paid street sweepers. At least, that was how the young ones thought of it.

The old ones saw the land being overtaxed, the latrines being hastily dug too close to the sources of water, the outbreaks of cholera and typhoid laying out whole neighbourhoods clotted with people, heard the party rhetoric of self-reliance and ground their few remaining teeth in the circular TANU hut and sat thinking for long stretches, blinking watery eyes turned blue with age. There wasn’t much else to do about it. This was progress.

Julius reached his house and absently called out “Hodi!” Without waiting for a karibu to welcome him inside, he shook off his sandals and slipped through the door. His father, the rector, was sitting on a church chair, which had lost a leg and therefore been inherited. It leaned against the wall so as to not fall over. In the niche in the wall there was a radio, which Julius’s father was listening to attentively. The news was being broadcast in crackly Kiswahili. He waved a quieting hand at Julius as he came in.

“Shikamoo,” Julius mumbled.

“Did you know they are moving the capital to Dodoma?” his father boomed over the radio set.

“House by house?” Julius inquired.

“Don’t be insolent,” his father replied mildly, turning the volume down. “It was voted. By the people. We are a democratic nation now.”

There was no vote about villagisation, though, Julius thought. Two years as a trainee mechanic in Dar es Salaam and now he was meant to be hoeing onions on a plot of land a 40 minutes’ walk away. “Living in villages is obligatory,” the Father of the Nation had said not six months ago. And Julius was named after him, the man engineering all this progress, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, all because Julius Jr had been born on the 29 October 1964 – the day the United Republic of Tanzania was born. Julius turned 18 last week. It was the only way he knew his age.

“You wait, my boy. We’ll soon be snapping at Europe’s heels,” his father said, leaning back in his chair and remembering its precariousness with a jolt. “There will be children in Switzerland learning Kiswahili at school. Mwalimu wasn’t educated at Oxford for nothing, you know.”

Julius stared at him flatly. His father snapped the radio off.

“I don’t know why you kids aren’t more excited about these changes,” he scolded. “You don’t know how strong we’ll be, once people stop thinking in their tribe and start working together as a nation. You’ll see.”

Selemani came alive when he played pool. He would sit on the floor at dinner with one knee up and roll a ball of white, starchy ugali in his right hand and think only of the cool weight of the white ball clanking in the underbelly of the billiards table and rolling tirelessly into the hollow at the table’s foot; then the satisfying knock it made as he clapped it down into the black spot on the green felt, the aged ivory brought back to Africa after being bought by Britons and lathed and polished in India. This was the ball the wazungu, the white man, took their shots with – the shots of scotch, the shots that brought the game down – and there he was, taking their place in Uzunguni. Him and the chaotic thunder of the colours and the stripes hurtling down from the rack, the care taken in arranging them properly and tightening them in the triangle with his slender fingers. Then – ah! then – the climactic crack of the break and the smooth, erratic scattering of the balls – there was something atomic about it. And then there was the way the players slunk low over the table with the cue carried delicately underneath, like panthers, sleekly creeping along a tree branch, eyes trained on the line and the angle and the ricochet each ball would make. None of them could predict the directions and the speeds that would explode out of each shot. And the thunk of the desired ball when it was potted, the satisfied shuffle of the player’s feet as he tested out positions for his next shot, or the bending of his knees in frustration reflex, clenching his fists and hissing as he realises he sank the white too – bahati mbaya, bad luck. It was music. It was a day without sweltering heat or mosquitoes. It was a drug. And in the final, leisurely circumambulation of the table, feeling the gaze of the bartenders in their stiff white waistcoats and red bowties, the whores in nylons and telephonecable weaves crossing their legs on the barstools and elongating their painted eyes at him, he’d think: What more could any man want but to win a game of billiards? And he would dunk the ball of ugali in the tomato mchuzi and wonder how long it would be before he could give up fixing shoes in the muddy streets of the village and go back to The Savannah Club.

The truck was still there, in the clearing between the rows of cotton and the sporadic banana palms and avocado trees. A mongoose scurried into one of them as Lemi approached, oscillating like the finger of a metronome as he walked, leaning heavily into his stick and lurching forward on his good leg. He checked to see that Selemani and Julius hadn’t arrived yet; he wanted to get a good look at the roof before they came so he would be spared the indignity of scrambling up onto the bonnet like a starfish on shore.

Lemi was not his real name. People called him Lemi after mlemavu, disabled boy, ill-formed one, yule aliyelema – the one who grew wrong. At an age when he could still remember how many summers he’d lived, he’d fallen sick with polio and his left leg stopped growing and started to wilt. Lemi sounded better; it was more like a European name – it was French, that was it. Or was it Remy? He didn’t know – everyone in the village mixed up their is and their rs, anyway. Everyone he knew did.

He laid a hand on the truck’s bonnet; it was cool and damp; the day was still being born. He dropped his pole and hopped around the truck’s nose, leaning against it as he went. Lemi got out of working in the fields because of his leg, but he still had to do other things, draw water, feed the goat, burn the rubbish. Today it was getting mwarobaini leaves for his uncle who was sweating in bed with malaria. The intense, bitter green, the dirty taste of quinine that killed intestinal parasites and lice and lowered high blood pressure; one cure for 40 diseases, hence its name – “the 40 tree”. He picked off a few flakes of paint around the crusted patches of rust on the bonnet, then lunged headfirst at it, heaving hard with his arms and kicking against the truck’s mudguard with his right leg and swung himself up, landing clumsily with his shoulder pressing on the murky glass of the windshield. From there, he crawled to the roof and the whole plain opened up to him like a pair of moist green hands. There was the village, toward the crooked crescent of mountains, there were the rippling fields of tea, cotton-wrapped heads ducked over them bobbing like balls in a pool.
It held him there in chilly, breathless awe for longer than he knew how to count; this was what Selemani could bound up and see when- ever he liked! Lemi shivered and tried to com- press as much detail as he could into this briefest of authences: the smoking houses high up on the mountains – they were brewing ba- nana beer this time of year, ready for when the girls came out of puberty seclusion; the galli- maufry of tin and thatched roofs in the rapidly expanding village; the almost invisible troop of colobus monkeys hopping about in the mango trees over there, with long, draping tails as red as the earth; and enlivening it all was the cool bite of the air, before the sun rose high and made the humidity swelter.

The mwarobaini could wait a minute or two more.

The boys set to work as soon as Selemani could smuggle out some tools from his workshop. Selemani was always the one on top, inspecting the coralline encrustations of rust and making supervisory comments. Julius sat on the roof, taking turns with a wooden mallet flattening the surface of the roof as evenly he could. It was an impossible task, all three knew – they didn’t have any felt, and the surface would end up dented and warped all over. But it became their overriding pleasure, of all things, one that made them equal in purpose. They dodged their plots of land and came home late to do it, urged on by the series of tasks which had to be done: strip bark off straight branches for the cues – mwarobaini’s best, get Lemi to do it; roll balls of clay and bake them in a fire and paint them with glossy shop-sign emulsion; sew fishing net into pockets for the corners.

Lemi oscillated back and forth on his stick, finishing the little jobs Julius and Selemani felt too important to do. But while he did them, he thought of the mural he would paint on the sides of the truck, a name for their pool table – make it a pool hall, sell sodas out of the boot! He worked out the lettering in his head as he plodded between his house and the truck each day, every time on the pretext of finding medicines or catching a runaway chicken. It would read: Babu Kubwa Billiards. Big Granddaddy Billiards.

They started attracting small crowds, mostly children wearing scraps of kangas in parrotish colours sewn into ruffled dresses and shirts. The kids stared at the three boys tinkering at this mudscabbed truck with eyes that had never known how their own faces looked and chewed on bits of plastic string. Then the tea-pickers started passing through; it broke the monotony of the work, laughing to each other in veiled interest at the three young men with city heads operating on their useless lump of metal.

“Don’t mind them,” Selemani told the others, though he was the one who minded the most.

In time their other jobs, the shoe-fixing and hoeing and weeding and chopping firewood and finding medicines, began to fade into a sort of translucent, water-skin background, the breakable surface of what really mattered. The more Julius’s father tried to impress upon him the beauty of working together as a nation, the humility of the common labourer and the holy economic balance God held such countries in, the more Julius daydreamed on the plot of land and woke up when smoothing out the roof of the truck. It had to be smooth enough to execute a satisfying break on, that was all; if he could just work that ridge flat and this lump even, it would result in the most ecstatic of sensations. That’s what Selemani said, anyway.

There came a morning, though, with no droppers-by, no idle teapickers or round-eyed children standing around watching the boys at their work. There didn’t even seem to be any birds circling above the plains, no clouds hanging over the mountains. It was as though someone was talking far off and the whole village was hushing its mouth to listen.

Selemani looked at Julius. “Is there somewhere we’re supposed tobe?” he asked.

Julius stared back at him with his eyes slightly apart, one on Selemani and the other on Selemani’s ear. “What month is it?”

“Pumpkin season,” Selemani replied, pressing his closed eyes with the pads of his thumb and forefinger. “E-heeeh. So it can’t be Independence Day. What else is there?”

A round of staccato gunfire studded the air, moving from left to right as if it were lead typewriter lettering on a loose piece of paper. The boys ducked; Selemani climbed inside the truck and instinctively moved to start the engine somehow, yanking desperately at the handbrake and pumping the gas. Julius slid into the back seat.

“There’s no engine,” he reminded his friend. “Or wheels.”

“Where’s Lemi?”

They fell silent. Selemani opened his door gingerly and shouted as quietly as he could through the crack.

“Lemi!” Nothing. “Leeeeemiiiii!” His call seemed to echo back at him from the road to the north, rustling in the dense border of trees that ran alongside it. Perhaps Lemi was over that way, cutting mwarobaini for the cues. Another of its 40 uses.

“The shots came from town. We’ll be safe out here,” Julius croaked. “What about Lemi?” Selemam” hissed. “We have to go find him!”

Julius looked out of the window. “How will we ever finish the truck without him?” he said weakly.

“Come on.” Selemani leapt from the truck and opened the back door for Julius. Then he turned and ran as low as he could, slinking like the panther crouched over the pool table, aligning himself with his prey on an infallible cross-country trajectory. The treelined road over to the north was the cushion running lengthways along the green felt ground; Selemani thought of the impact he would make against the cushion, the angle of the ricochet perfectly mirrored on the other side of the perpendicular. He was the smooth wooden cue, the hand that shunted it forward, the ball it cracked against – the whole, single-minded focus of the game, and he’d win it.

Julius scrambled after Selemani clumsily. He wasn’t used to running; his uncle told him once when his father wasn’t listening that one day he’d get a good job in the government filing documents and writing assessments – who needed to be fit for that? Farmers were fit because they were poor and had nobody to do work for them.

They came to the road into town, sheltered by mango trees crowding their shoulders together and depositing sugary offerings on the soil all around, rotting and stinking of fruit alcohol. Selemani slowed down, ready to make his sharp 40-degree angle turn to look elsewhere for Lemi, when the sound of approaching footsteps killed his momentum. He shot low under a bush. Julius loped into view and Selemani grabbed his shirt and pulled him down beside him.

It was a regiment of askari, young Tanzanian men in slightly faded camouflage fatigues and neatly lopsided caps lit up with a gold emblem and trousers tucked into spit-polished black boots, rifles slung over one shoulder.

“Is Lemi there?” Julius asked.

“Wake up, Julius! They’re going to war!”

“Are we at war?”

“You don’t have a clue, do you?” Selemani frowned. “Idi Amin invaded Kagera last month. These are our troops. They’re going to defend our country.”

Julius sat silently with his arms folded around his knees, staring at the ground. He shivered and a sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. An ant as long as his thumbnail was struggling to carry the mutilated body of another, its head crushed inwards and its legs flailing miserably in tiny, almost imperceptible death throes. Julius shuddered and watched as the bigger ant held it with two legs and marched on with the other two. Any moment, I could put my toe down and kill the two of them, Julius thought. Perhaps it would be better off; then the dying ant could the quicker and the healthy ant wouldn’t have to go to all that effort. But much as he visualised the act, the quiet snap of crushed exoskeleton, the gradual cessation of movement and the little wet spot on his toe, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“You don’t think they have Lemi, do you?” he asked.

“Of course not. He’s too crippled to go to war. Just as well they didn’t see us, though-we’re old enough for the army now.”

Julius looked back at the ants and wondered if he would do the same if his friend went down. That’s what soldiers did, wasn’t it? He shivered and waited for the ant to cross the patch of dirt and disappear into the base of a hibiscus bush.

“Why did Idi Amin invade, anyway?” he asked.

Selemani shrugged. “I don’t know. It’ll probably be over soon. We’ll fight them off and get back to business.”

“Yeah, we’ll get back to business.”

“Progress!” Selemani smiled.

“We’re going to make Africa the richest place on earth!” Julius replied.

Selemani laughed and punched Julius on the arm, and Julius breathed his relief in deeply and felt good.

The regiment passed and met with a convoy of trucks where their path joined the main road. It was going to get tarmacked soon, that was the news from the town council. Out in the distance, a thin cloth of white mist lay over the mountains and the red-brown strip of earth the askari marched on trailed away into the greenery of the cloud forest. They could see yellow-backed baboons sitting in the trees, munching things thoughtfully and watching as the regiment passed, quick march, hup-two-threefour.

Julius and Selemani leisurely made their way back to the truck. As they neared it, they could see Lemi sitting on the roof waving at them, his stick leaning against the front wheel and a big smile on his face.

“I finished the cues,” he called through cupped hands.

Selemani stopped midfield and stood, leaning his weight on one foot. From here the truck looked like a sculpted mass of powder, a dusty mirage slumped on the earth with no engine, no dashboard, no wheels and no hope of ever moving. And there were boys from his town only a year or two older than him marching off to fight, ranged in formation and ordered to kill so that this country could fulfill its promise to its people – money, running water, jobs with uniforms. Freedom from tyranny, protect the little guy. It all seemed somehow fruitless, the potential pool hall in the midst of tea fields and mango trees, mongoose and mountain cats watching from a distance, mosquitoes and jiggers clamouring for a meal.

Julius kept walking, his hands dangling limply at his sides. He saw the powdery lump, Lemi’s impromptu throne, and his job filing documents for the government and growing fat faded away in that moment. What did it matter, seeing as one of his country’s neighbours might invade whenever it felt like it? The pride he’d felt over his nation’s glorious prospects imploded unceremoniously; when death is so near that you feel its breath on your face, no place is ever rich enough to save you.

From where Lemi sat, though, the whole valley basin looked cool and green, laced with mist and still as Paradise. The sun had crested the mountain ridge and now lay strips of beeswax yellow across the fields, mapping out the pattern of stepped crops and banana palms that ornamented the mountain’s slopes. The farmers were at home, resting-God knows how they needed it. He would sit on the roof of the truck for a while longer and look around at this liquid cure, this moving portrait that concealed the artist’s signature in every line and curve, and then limp home and think himself back there whenever he got tired.

He’d just sit a minute or two more.

Discourses directly affect actions, and are, as a matter of fact, already an important category of actions. Discourses that are hateful, vengeful, and destructive can only lead to actions of grotesque cruelty and mayhem. Discourses that are loving, forgiving, and constructive can only lead to actions marked by compassionate gentleness and harmony.

The deeper the creedal roots of a discourse, the more potency and efficacy it has in the arena of action. Hateful and destructive creedal discourse is catastrophically destructive to humanity. Loving and constructive creedal discourse is wholesome and nourishing.

Again, the more authoritative the source of the discourse is, the more potency and efficacy it has, at the level of action. Discourses coming from a community’s leadership are of utter importance and effectiveness. They have an immediate effect on teaching, preaching, and individual and communal conduct.

The Muslim community, like any other human community, is called upon, for the sake of God and His beloved creatures, to articulate a wholesome creedal discourse that is truly in line with its Godassigned duty on earth, and that leads to proper loving conduct towards God’s beloved creatures.

Such wholesome Muslim creedal discourse must not be that of a few scattered individuals. It must be a communal discourse built upon communal consensus, and rooted in the revelatory sources of Islam: the Qur’an and the sunna of the Prophet of God, Muhammad (peace be upon him), and in the communally inherited and transmitted example of his blessed companions, and righteous kinship and followers. Furthermore, it must clearly and unanimously come from the very leadership of the Muslim community.

The criteria of wholesome creedal discourse has been endowed to us by God Himself in the glorious Qur’an: “See you not how God sets forth a parable? – a goodly word as a goodly tree, whose root is firmly fixed, and its branches (reach) to the sky (i.e. very high). Giving its fruit at all times, by the leave of its Lord and God sets forth parables for mankind in order that they may remember” (14: 24-25). Thus, all proper and wholesome creedal discourse must be:

* Rooted

* Open-ended

* Ever fresh and fruitful

Muslim creedal discourse today must strive to abide by these divine criteria. It must be firmly rooted in: the Qur’an, the sunna, and the ijma’of the Umma. It must be open-ended through the dialectical and respectful dialogue with other religions and philosophies. It must be constantly refreshed and focused on bearing fruits that can serve the community and humanity at large.

In an unprecedented, and immensely important, communal consensus (constituting a spiritual, moral, and juridical normative ijma’ or accord, 138 prominent Muslim leaders got together and planted a wholesome seed for such a wholesome tree: a healing creedal discourse of “Love of the One God, and Love of the Neighbor”.

These 138 leaders, collectively guiding and influencing millions of Muslims all over the globe, include religious authorities, scholars, teachers, intellectuals, and media leaders, from Sunni, Shi’a fla’fari, Zaidi, and Isma’ili), and Ibadi schools.

They jointly launched the document as an “Open Letter and Call from Muslim Religious Leaders” addressed to the heads of all prominent Christian churches, and to the “leaders of Christian Churches, everywhere”. They titled the document, following a Qur’anic phrasing, “A Common Word between Us and You”.

The hope-giving promise of this “Common Word” is worthy of deep reflection, and is of immense importance for at least the following ten reasons.

1. It is addressed by leaders who collectively guide and influence millions of Muslims to leaders who guide and influence millions of Christians.

2. It is deeply rooted in the scriptures of both Islam and Christianity, and as such, already uses a dialogical scriptural reasoning from the very start. This is solid foundation of all sorts of dialogical engagements in future stages.

3. It goes back to the very foundations, and with utter and humble simplicity reinvigorates, rehabilitates, and re-proclaims the simple but immensely powerful theology of love of the One God, and love of the neighbor.

4. It appeals to foundational revelatory and scriptural consensus upon which sensible human beings can agree, and that can serve as the solid basis for further elaborations and constructs .

5. It retrieves the gentle invitational mode of discourse that is founded in the true recognition of the other, and that truly revives the proper Muslim discourse of “wisdom and fair exhortation” that is mandated by God in the Qur’an.

6. It speaks prophetically and invokes the collective prophetic and revelatory inheritance of all of humanity. Thus, it restores and heals prophetic kinship between the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities.

7. By invoking both Torah and the New Testament, it addresses Christians, but already prepares the ground for a much-needed further discourse towards healing relations with the Jews.

8. The document retrieves the very roots of a proper Muslim theology of gratitude. By invoking the saving efficacy of Divine compassionate-grace (rahma), and seeing all of religiosity as an attitude of thanksgiving and appreciation of Divine generosity, the document lays a solid foundation for grace-filled theology, teaching, and preaching that will result in grace-based actions in our troubled world.
9. “A Common Word” definitively and authoritatively retrieves and rearticulates a solid Muslim theology that responds to divine graceful generosity with sincere devotion and exclusive worship of the One God; but a theology that also sees that such response to God must concretely manifest itself in the love of our neighbors and all of God’s creatures.

10. Finally, the document invokes key realities and notions that will be the seed for much further theological and spiritual elaboration in future documents: the heart, wisdom, paradigmatic example-following, divine remembrance, and divinely-endowed human dignity and freedom.

Finally, I wholeheartedly believe that the true promise of this vital document, “A Common Word”, is that it is a first, but monumental step, towards retrieving and reliving the true Muslim way that was vividly described, long ago, by a spiritual master called Sidi Ahmed al-Rifa’i:

“Master Ibrahim al-Azab (may God be pleased with him) said: ‘I said to Master Ahmed (al-Rifa’i): ‘My Master, the seekers discussed the way to God, and had many opinions’. He replied: ‘My son, the ways to God are as many as the breaths of creatures! Oh Ibrahim, your grandfather (referring to himself) left no way without exploring (except those ways that God did not will for him). Oh Ibrahim, I explored all ways, and found no way closer, more-giving, more-hopeful, and more lovely than the way of meekness (ajz), brokenness inkisar), bewilderment (hayra), and poverty (iftiqar) (before God).’1

The document reopens precisely this way to God, the way of utter devotion to the One God, and utter love for His creatures. Such a simple, but profound way consists of:

1. Continuously remembering God and His compassion towards us.

2. Living in gratitude for God’s compassion, through total devotion to Him.

3. Living as intensely as possible in mutual compassion (tarahum) with our neighbors.

The sooner we Muslims rehabilitate and mend our classical networks and institutions, and reconnect them with the rest of humanity in sincere and humble dialogue, the more able we will be to serve God and humanity. This “Common Word” is a great first step along the way.