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"Profile: Dialogues"

Islamic Focus Issue 2, December 2006

New York

By Shaanti Kapila

Background

Since its inception in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, New York University’s Dialogues: Islamic World-U.S.-The West has engaged in activities aimed at knocking down the walls of misunderstanding between the Islamic world, the United States, and the West at large and replacing them with bridges of knowledge, mutual respect, and reason.

Through international conferences, seminars, panel discussions, publications, and multi-media tools, Dialogues brings contentious issues between the Muslim and Western worlds into a more rational plane. The program’s conferences are based on solid scholarly background material and bring together policy analysts, policy-makers, scholars, religious leaders, business and NGO leaders, and media decision-makers, with the goal of altering public perceptions and effecting policy change. The conferences result in the development of policy recommendations, which are submitted to governments, international organizations, and civil society institutions. Findings from the program are published as policy papers and are distributed to educational institutions worldwide for use by students, faculty, and researchers. Moreover, Dialogues is creating a network of leaders and other concerned individuals who will continue to communicate with and consult one another formally and informally for years to come—a valuable network for negotiating peace in times of crisis. Ultimately, dialogue should extend to the general population, thus allowing the widest possible scope of participation and expression.

The program has received financial support from a growing network of funders, including the American philanthropic foundations—the Carnegie Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the governments of Austria, France, Malaysia, the State of Qatar, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom; Majlis El Hassan, the non-governmental organization of His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan; the Spanish foundation El Legado Andalusí; and individual philanthropists Farooq Kathwari and Mortimer Zuckerman.

Dialogues’ Advisory Board of 21 eminent Muslim and Western scholars, religious leaders, policy-makers and business executives is co-chaired by HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan and Lisa Anderson, Dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and also includes Marc Perrin de Brichambaut, Secretary General of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Mustafa Cerić, Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Maleeha Lodhi, High Commissioner of Pakistan to the United Kingdom, and Mortimer Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of US News & World Report and Publisher of New York Daily News.

Activities

To date, Dialogues has organized three international conferences—on “Clash of Civilizations or Clash of Perceptions?” in Granada, Spain in October 2002, on Islam and elections in Amman, Jordan in March, 2004, and on “Who speaks for Islam? Who speaks for the West?” in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in February 2006. The Kuala Lumpur conference convened at a time when tensions between the Muslim and Western worlds reached a crisis point as a result of the Danish cartoons controversy. The conferees debated issues such as mutual misperceptions and the media, the impact of globalization on the Muslim world, the challenges posed by science and technology to the Muslim-Western encounter, and future frameworks for the Muslim-Western relationship. The participation of such eminent Muslim and Western figures as Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi of Malaysia, former president Mohammad Khatami of Iran, Grand Mufti Mustafa Cerić, and Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash helped, through their pronouncements to the media, to restore calm and reason to a potentially explosive situation. The report of the conference, which was published in August 2006, offers practical recommendations for laying the groundwork for peaceful coexistence and civilized alliance between the two great traditions, and is available online at www.islamuswest.org.

Dialogues’ forthcoming conference on “Muslim Youth and Women in the West: Source of Concern or Source of Hope?” will tackle timely questions raised by the growing populations of established Muslim communities in Western countries. Given the intense scrutiny now faced by these communities, primarily for security reasons, but also for the social and cultural repercussions of their presence, and combined with the concern among Western policy-makers about how to integrate large (and growing) Muslim populations, it is not surprising that the conference has already generated much interest and promises to be an important event. The conference will focus in particular on youth and women, who have emerged from traditional roles and are forging new identities for themselves, and, in some instances, are becoming role models, leaders within their communities and primary agents of change. The conference will take place in May 2007 in Salzburg, Austria.

Dialogues also sponsors a number of local events at New York University to engage the New York area community, including members of the United Nations diplomatic community, in important conversations on topics impacting Muslim-Western relations. These events include an ongoing series of panel discussions on the relationship between the United States and the Islamic world as well as a series of lectures and roundtable talks featuring the proponents of a “new ijtihad,” the latter highlighting the work of bold Muslim thinkers who are challenging long-standing interpretations of Islamic scripture and heritage in their efforts to critique Islam from within. Distinguished scholars who have participated in the “new ijtihad” events include Mohamed Charfi, Abdelmajid Charfi, and Hamadi Redissi from Tunisia, and Boutheina Cheriet from Algeria. Dialogues has a tradition of paying homage to eminent Muslim leaders and has hosted lectures and receptions in New York in honor of HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan and HH Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of the State of Qatar, and will host forthcoming events in 2007 in honor of Farooq Kathwari, a prominent Muslim-American who is President and CEO of the American home furnishings company Ethan Allen, and HRH Prince Turki Al-Faisal, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States and  a strong advocate for opening channels of dialogue between the Muslim and Western worlds. Reports and photographs from all of Dialogues’ events can be found on the program’s website, www.islamuswest.org.
 
Successes and Future Plans

After four years of activities, Dialogues has established a reputation as a serious and important program, grounded in solid scholarship and objective analysis. It is clear that the program’s activities are making an impact. Dialogues’ conferences are widely discussed in international policy circles, its publications are used as educational material in university classrooms, its network of peacemakers is growing—with tangible evidence that important links are being forged as a result of its activities, its staff are sought after to contribute the program’s perspective through conferences, advisory panels, and in the media, and funders are showing recognition and support.

With the support of New York University, Dialogues is optimistic that the program will soon be transformed into an endowed Center for Dialogues. This new center will expand upon Dialogues current operations to foster discussion, analysis and intellectual exchange through fellowship and exchange programs, education and research, conferences for multiple tiers of decision-makers and professionals, publications and multi-media projects, and a public policy resource center and clearinghouse. 

In these difficult times where anger, extremism and misunderstanding appear to have gained the upper hand, Dialogues’ work is crucial. Through dialogue based on mutual respect, Muslim and Western community leaders can dispel the current climate of anger, check extremist trends, and lay the foundations for a more comprehensive and lasting peace.

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© 2006, The Center for Dialogues: Islamic World - U.S. - The West

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