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ISLAM AND THE WEST- FOUNDATIONS OF CONFLICT

By Mikail R. Jubran

Common Beginnings

From the inception of Islam, Muslims viewed Christians and Jews as distant relatives. By virtue of the fact that they worshiped the same God, they were called ‘ahl al-kitab’, the People of the Book. This was underscored by the fact that Islam has its common basis in the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - all of which share the two greatest commandments: •	To love God with all our heart, mind soul and strength •	To love our neighbors - our fellow human beings - regardless of race, religion, or cultural background as we love ourselves Several Seventeenth century ideas formed the core institutional support for the second commandment: •	The notion that reasonable interest on a monetary loan does not amount to usury - an idea that made possible a certain system of banking •	The invention of the corporation, especially the notion that the corporation is a separate "person", with owners (shareholders) protected from responsibility for any liability, such as unpaid debt or crime incurred by the company.

Thus two practices that were once major sins in all the Abrahamic faith traditions; now combined with the emergences of modern liberal democracy to radically improve the fortunes of the Western world - both of these led to the creation of enormous wealth and fueled the rise of the West to economic dominance, which continues to this day. Not being able to accept these ideas is one of the primary reasons the Muslim world lagged behind the West and Asian nations, which did not have to contend with the religious restrictions that held the Muslim world back. This strict prohibition in the Muslim world largely prevented it from robustly developing the financial markets, institutions of banking, capital markets and stock exchanges – the foundations of capitalism. Neither could Muslim nations effectively control their own monetary policies since the raising and lowering of rates is the chief way a nation’s central bank controls inflation and the amount of money in circulation.

Powerful Beliefs

In the three major faiths, beliefs are powerful for two primary reasons: •	They affect our power or economic status •	They constitute an asset of their own

Beliefs are among our most deeply prized possessions and they are especially cherished by those whose identities are wrapped up in their beliefs on a particular matter. It doesn't matter what one's belief is, what matters is your psychological attachment to the importance of the belief, especially as it affects you personally.

Thus the challenge to anyone involved in conflict resolution is always how to map the core underlying issues of power and assets, which often are not obvious on the surface. What keeps violence going is the powerful set of emotional attachments on each side.

Motivators of Religious Violence

There are two categories of civil communal relationships and engagement: associational (money/power issues) and everyday issues. •	Associational: political parties, business associations, trade unions, professional associations, sport clubs

•	Every day: routine interaction, family visits, festivals, conventions

Associational relationships are more binding. Issues of money and power tend to be concentrated within associational forms of civic engagement rather than on relationships of everyday category. Associational relationships allow for the formation of personal identity and common-interest bonds. They sometimes exist across religious lines and work to dissipate tensions that in other places could evolve into explosive conflict.

Key Historical Threads That Led to Islamic Fundamentalism

The effort of European colonial powers to Europeanize Muslim and other societies sowed seeds of conflict by deeply confusing the subject people's identity in two ways. First was the conflict - what has been referred to the 'tear' - in those societies caused by creating new elite of natives in a European image. For example, what the British did in India when they created a race of so called "brown Englishmen" ruling over India, thereby tearing a segment of Indian society from itself culturally, linguistically, and religiously. The French did the same in Algeria and West Africa. Secondly, European colonialism resulted from splitting traditional identities / by creating new nation-state identities based upon geography. While indigenous non ~ European societies identified themselves traditionally by tribe, language or religion, colonial powers divided peoples like the Kurds and Uzbecks among two or more nation-states. The Kurds were denied their own nation and forced to live in Turkey, Iraq or Iran, while the Uzbecks ended up in Afghanistan and Uzbeckistan. Splitting a people who feel part of one nation into two or three - forcing them to be part of another identity, or creating altogether new identities and expecting them to take root based more on geographic identity is a recipe for conflict. The reverse trend, combining different peoples into a new identity that is based on nothing but geography, further antagonizes conflict seeded by colonialism.

The above currents were compounded by: •	The rapid accumulation of Western wealth, fueled by democratic capitalism, and the perception that this wealth is used to aggravate the plight of the poor. •	A psychological sense that the Islamic world had "fallen behind" and that its civic institutions were not living up to the second commandment in terms of providing for its people, even in Islamic terms. •	The social tears and fault lines of conflict etched in the unnatural landscape left behind by European colonialism; the rise of a 'militant' modern secularism, which threatened traditional Islamic culture and religion. •	The perception throughout most of the twentieth century that Western nations restricted their political and military support to undemocratic regimes.

The above trends, taken together, fertilized the soil of frustration in which Twentieth-century Islamic fundamentalism grew and flourished.

It was in the late 1700s up until the twentieth century when European power was ascendant and dominated and colonized Muslim peoples. Western norms, ideas, and culture infiltrated the Muslim world. Islam's interaction with the West gave rise to Islamic nationalism that was of a primarily reactive substance.

The world's most acute example of such interaction was the creation of the religious nation-state, which has contributed to a painful global conflict - the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The creation of Israel, and the manner of its creation, began an acute schism between Jews and Muslims who until then throughout most of their history had experienced a deeply intimate kinship with each other. Israel was a European creation, a by-product of the nation-state idea.

Islam vs. Islamism

Defining Islam as a religious system rather than a universal act of submission is dangerous and has fed Islamic triumphalism and fueled modern Islamic militancy and sectarian violence. The use of the rather recent tern Islamism to refer to militancy done ostensibly in the name of Islam is a particularly pernicious use of language. It merges the faith of Islam with modern political movements in such a way as to make a non-Muslim think that Islam itself is the source of the militancy. When we use language in such a way that it creates relationships that do not exist in reality, the results are not only confusing but dangerous, because people can and do act upon their misunderstandings.

Does Religion Cause Conflicts?

Ultimately the root cause of conflict is nearly always the loss of an asset - a thing of really high value. The other root cause of conflict is issues of power - who gets to control decision. Thus issues become triggers of violence if they translate into loss of power or tangible assets.

Once an agreement is kindled, a psychological pattern develops in which we looked at what differentiates us from the other side and often wrongfully attribute the conflict to that difference. This difference then contributes to the otherness of our opponent and feeds the righteousness of our cause. In time differences become deep-seated beliefs that continue to fuel conflict and may take generations to correct.

Those traits that have historically been used to prevent groups of people from sharing in power and economic assets are in reality secondary causes of conflict and should accurately be regarded as identity tags, which we find useful labeling the other in any given conflict.

Identity tags can be gender, race, color, class or even religion. Some examples that come to mind are:

•	The massacres in Rwanda between the Tutsis and Hutus are of tribal conflict •	The tensions in India are about religion and caste (class) differentiation •	The conflict in Ireland represents one of the subgroups of the same religion (Protestants vs. Catholics)

Each of these differences is not the root cause of the conflict but rather the identity tag used to separate each one group from another with regard to the real causes of conflict namely, power and economics. When a conflict drags on for years, people tend to forget its true source and attribute it instead to the differentiating secondary causes or secondary identity tags by which we define the other, whom we are taught to demonize. The origins of so-called Islamic violence lie not in religion but in the politics and economics of the Muslim world. Autocratic rule, unhealthy economies, unrelenting poverty creates a fertile breeding ground for extremist philosophies and terrorism. Thus the drawing power of Islamic opposition groups derives not from religion, but from their ability to tap into the personal frustrations and feelings of social injustice that is felt daily by millions of Muslims. These groups have capitalized on these frustrations, addressed them within a religious context that worked to inspire and motivate their followers. Thus the bases of terrorism were produced; whereby violence is used to gain specific objectives even though innocent civilians are killed.

This is what is happening in Israel, Palestine and Iraq.

It is in the face of such violence that Islamic law needs to be understood in its rejection of terrorism and the deliberate killing of innocent civilians. The roots of terrorism lie not in theology but in human psychology and in the hatred born of violent conflict over politics or power, and economic assets such as land. Those who utilize terrorism are none other but reluctant adversaries who were victims of the lack of democratic governance, which caused the stresses that cracked the structure of the societies they lived in. What they seek is justice, not vengeance. Their quarrel is not with modernity but with the aggressive neo-liberal ideology that has been prosecuted in its name in pursuit of a global market society more conducive to profits for some than to justice for all.

Communicating Through History

The West must begin to understand the ideas that shaped the collective history of its and Islam's histories as a step towards creating the channels of communication necessary to increase respect between these two traditions.

Five specific epochs mark the turning points in Islamic history:

1.	The Model Universal Islamic Community -

The first thirteen years of the Prophet Mohammed's mission, from 610 to 622 CE, which were focused on teaching his contemporaries the notion of one God. The ten years from 622 to 632 witnessed the Prophet and his nascent community plant in Medina the seeds of an Islamic good society. This period saw the Hijra or fleeing from Mecca to Medina, the event that birthed the Islamic community historically as a society. What makes this period unique in Islamic history is that here was where God worked with human material to develop a set of guidelines that could inform a universal or global Islamic community. The community led by Mohammed until his death in 632 put in practice the commandments revealed to him in the Quran, as had been revealed to the prophets before him. Thus a social model was created for future Muslims to strive toward, one whose membership was open to anyone who surrounded to the One God, a concept that transcended the social stratification of the old tribal ways.

2.	The Rightly Guided Caliphs, 632-661 CE -

The second period of Islamic history is that between 632 and 661 CE, called the era of the Rashidun, or "rightly guided" caliphs. With Medina still the political capital of the Muslim world, the community was led by close companions of the Prophet steeped in an understanding of the Quran and the Prophet's example and teachings. This is also the period of the expansion of Islam or economically driven conquests into the neighboring countries. Muslim rule over the neighboring societies of Egypt, Byzantium, and Iran also brought a unique challenge, which was how the rulers in Medina were going to administer an empire containing members of other faiths. The rule of the "Rightly Guided" Caliphs was characterized by morality and compassion; the seeds of future political conflict were planted then. The subjects of conquered lands were treated well and were given the freedom to practice their own faiths in a pluralistic society, as stipulated in the Quran.

Although the success of Islamic expansion was due to the testimony of the message of Mohammed, the goal of this expansion was economic. This was not about the spreading of Islam by the ‘sword’, of which the West so erroneously believes.

3.	Intellectual Fermentation Period, 661 - 1500 CE -

This period was marked by the marked intellectual development - the translation into Arabic of Greek rationalist works on philosophy, and by incorporation of the arts and sciences from all parts of the known world at that time. The Islamic intellectual centers were the cities of Baghdad, Damascus, Cordoba, and Cairo. This era saw the birth of the sciences of religious study - Arabic grammar, the collection of the Prophet's Hadiths, and Islamic jurisprudence. Dynastic political rule began with the Umayyads in Damascus, who were usurped by the Abbasids who moved the Caliphate to Baghdad, while the remnants of the Umayyad family founded the Caliphate of the West in Cordoba or AI-Andalus. There were splinter dynasties also founded in this period - the Fatimid in Cairo, the Almoravids, and the Almohades in northwest Africa, who became to be known in the West as the Moors. This period also witnessed two cataclysmic events in Islamic history: the Mongol invasion of 1258 which destroyed Baghdad and the eastern regions of the Muslim world; and the ejection of the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula during the "Reconquista" and the Spanish Inquisition. These destructive periods came on the heels of the Christian Crusades in the area of Palestine. The Mongol invasion was checked by the Maluku sultan of Egypt at the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, thus stemming the Mongol period of expansion in the east.

It was this attack by non-Muslims on the Muslim world that resulted in a period when the Muslim intellectual mind literally retreated. With their libraries laid to waste and invaluable manuscripts lost, Islam's intellectual elite froze, beginning a period when Muslims veered sharply to the right and became defensive. Islamic intellectual effort was focused on maintaining the survival of what was learned rather than on expanding knowledge further.

4.	Non - Arab Muslim rule, 1100s - 1800s -

The major developments of Islam during this period were the institutionalization of Sufism and the forms of political governance. Political power shifted to the Seljuk Turks (1077 - 1307), followed by the Ottomans (1281-1924), whose capital was Istanbul, Turkey.

This period is also inclusive of the Safavids (1501-1732), whose capital was in Iran, and the Moguls’ (1526-1858), among whose capitals were Agra and Delhi in India. Arab dominance faded as non-Arab Muslim rule replaced it within a dominion of empire. These new Muslim societies did not continue to advance the boundaries of knowledge as had their predecessors of the classical Islamic period. Also the Islamic character of this era was different culturally from the Arab Semitic and African tone of Islam which defined the first millennium of Islamic history, although the Islamic faith and orthodoxy was marked by a spiritual and political expansion as a result of the development of new and different cultures.

5.	The Western and European Paradigm, 1700s-1900s -

From the late 1700s and especially throughout the twentieth century, European ascendant power dominated and colonized the Muslim peoples. Western norms, ideas and culture infiltrated the Muslim world. During this period of Muslim history, initiatives were shaped by the Muslim world's interaction with the West - Islamic nationalism, apologetics, and the quality of Islamic activism were primarily reactive rather than proactive. This period began with Napoleon's occupation of Egypt in 1798, the Portuguese penetration of India and the Far East, who were then displaced by the Dutch and later by the British.

During this time the European colonizers introduced to the Muslim world the concept that the nation-state was based upon geographic boundaries, especially after World War I, when the majority of the Muslim peoples had received political independence on a gradual plane. The longing for national identity that existed prior to the imposition of geographic boundaries continued to rise. The majority of the revivalist movements within the Muslim world, and political dynamics of our time, have their genesis in this period. These included responses which regarded themselves as efforts leading to a pure Islam - Islam of the original pious predecessors - the "salafi movements" (as-salaf as-salih). One response was an attempt to revive an authentic Islamic impulse free of the excesses that had accrued over the centuries; while another was in reactionary responses to those excesses. These responses included:

•The Wahhabi movement of Abd al-Wahhab in the Arabian Peninsula advocated an Islamic society that began all over again as in the time of the Prophet, based solely upon the Quran and the Prophet's Sunnah.

•Sufi revivalism - whose approach was to recognize and save what, is spiritually beautiful and valuable; focusing on contemplative life and avoiding involvement in political and worldly affairs. This movement spread in North Africa (Morocco) by the followers of Abu Hamid ad-Darqawi, the order founded by Ahmad at-Tijani - the Tijaniyya order - spread to northwest Africa and Sudan, the Sanusi movement of Mohammad as-Sunusi in the central Sahara region of Libya, and the movement of Mullah Sadra in Iran.

Blending of East

European power excited many Muslim thinkers, who recognized in European civilization much of what once had made Muslim society great and what Islam had lost. Such movements included that of Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani who united traditional Islamic scholarship with a familiarity with European and modern thought and which inspired a whole generation of political revolutionaries and venerable scholars; the Salafiyya reform movement of Muhammad Abduh in Egypt, who sought to retain the best of Islamic thought and blend it with the positive things learned from the West. These movements posed a challenge to Muslim thinkers, for while they favored assimilation of some aspects of Western civilization without losing their cultural and religious heritage, they were simultaneously struggling for independence from political and economic control from the West.

While the above mentioned movements sought to blend what they recognized as the best of Western ideals with a revival of Islamic civilization and to discard the worst of each - political events intruded. Notable were the ending of the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey in 1924 by Kamal Ataturk; the coup of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in 1954; and in Iran the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi - regimes that were influenced by Western secularism and which suppressed and marginalized religious elements of their countries. Complicating the picture during this time was the attempts of the Soviet Union to export Communism and the advent of the cold war with the United States.

Western Interaction with the Western World

Much of the conflict of the past century between the Muslim world and the West has its roots in the Western-initiated breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and which carried strong religious overtones.

The parceling of this empire by England, France and Russia, ensured that the region would be a breeding ground for future conflict. The United States under President Woodrow Wilson, wanted to see those parts of the Ottoman Empire assured an opportunity of autonomous development of other nationalities that had been under Turkish rule.

With the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as world superpowers with the birth of the atomic age. The U.S. and the Soviet Union could not fight each other directly, but fought each other by proxy, setting up spheres of influence in much of the world. This was the era of the Cold War and it played itself throughout the countries of Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Indonesia. The Muslim world was a key part of the global chessboard on which the cold war was played.

This East-West competition led to open warfare in some cases, notably in Afghanistan in 1978, which became one of the playgrounds between the U.S. and the Soviets. The U.S. was prompted to play the Islamic religious card in combating the Soviets in Afghanistan by using its close relationship with the Saudis and Pakistanis, thus giving rise to the mujahedeen movement, which drew in Muslim fighters from many foreign countries. The U.S., during the cold war, helped forge an Islamic warlike citizen - by its support of madrasas as in Pakistan that taught radical ideology as preparation for fighting the Soviet Union. When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1988, the mujahedeen fighters, who had been armed, trained and financed by Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, returned to societies that did not have job opportunities for them, thus fueling intense frustrations. This had profound implications not only on the domestic politics of Muslim societies, but also on the relationship between them and non-Muslim societies; thus giving rise to Islamic fundamentalism. It was these same mujahedeen fighters who later made their way as volunteers to the Bosnian-Serbian conflict in the Balkans, and later gave impetus and provided recruits for the Islamist Al Qaeda movement of fundamentalist leader Osama bin-Laden.

Globalization and Islam

Globalization is defined as the human activity of moving our goods, our services, our ideas, and our selves around the world with national borders becoming increasingly porous. Globalization causes anxiety because it is forcing societies to change -economically, politically, socially, and religiously. In the Muslim world the major concern is the erosion of social, family, and moral values because of the encroachment of what is seen as immoral values by way of satellite television and the entertainment media. The rapid process of globalization is forcing people to evolve toward commonly shared norms and thus to become more alike. This naturally leads to tension between those struggling to hold on to those Values that are challenged and in danger of disappearing, and those struggling to forge ahead and replace old values with the new.

Healing the Relationship Between Islam and the West

There presently exists a dismal state of public relations worldwide between the Muslim world and the West. What is required is a strategic and radical, transformation that needs implementation of a quick-acting, multi-track process to address a broad spectrum of issues that have fueled the conflict. Specific objectives would be required to heal the relationship; the most primary step would be dialogue. Both sides must replace their fear and misunderstandings with friendship and empathy. Dialogue creates a climate in which deeper issues become easier to address. Refusal of dialogue prolongs conflict.

Another objective towards healing the relationship would be for the United States to pursue a new foreign policy toward the Muslim world. Such a foreign policy would assist the Muslim world in attaining certain major objectives:

• Economic freedom: the establishment of basic economic infrastructures and controls necessary for Muslim countries to develop prosperous societies that will increase the quality of life for all citizens; reform of banking systems, and sound monetary policies. • The rule of law: for Muslims world-wide, this includes justice, security, and freedom from fear. Muslim societies need an independent judiciary, not one whose decisions can be determined by individuals in political office. The rule of law also implies essential economic legislation to create greater equality of opportunity. • Broader public participation: decision making and governance in Muslim countries; accountability for the protection of human rights. • An Islamically articulated separation-of-powers doctrine, translating into:

1. a judiciary independent of the executive and legislative branches 2. an economy free from state control, combined with a non-monopolistic private sector with safeguards against corruption 3. a military that does not interfere in the affairs of governance 4. a free press with greater access to government actions to help educate the populace and aid in holding its rulers accountable 5. freedom of religious expression and conscience and protection of all religious institutions and houses of worship

Simultaneously, the U.S needs to commit itself to fully resolving three long¬standing conflicts:

1. The Israeli-Palestinian, which would eliminate Muslim-Jewish religious tensions 2. The Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan, which would eliminate Muslim-Hindu religious tension 3. The Chechnya conflict with Russia

Significantly, there also exists within the U.S. the challenge of the development of an American Islamic identity that can meaningfully encompass all the sundry immigrant Muslim identities as well as the local African American identity. The goal here is to develop a local mind-set and way of living. The history between the Muslim world and the West, including America, has unfortunately led many Americans to equate being Muslim with being anti-American and anti-Western. The best way for American Muslims to find their American identity lies through learning from the immigrant experience of American Catholics and Jews. They would take guidance from the lessons gleaned from Islamic history, when the earliest Muslims spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula to the ancient cultures from West Africa to Southeast Asia. With such knowledge American Muslims can more rapidly shape a new definition of what it means to be an American Muslim in a globalized world.

Eliminating this tension requires sifting through the psychological layers of past individual and collective experience, separating history from essential humanity, shedding what is irrelevant, and building an identity based on what is eternal to the human condition in a new America and a globalized world. Thus Muslims face a unique challenge in this regard, for when Christianity and Judaism took root in Europe; they developed an Occidental character different from their Semitic roots. Islam has yet to develop an Occidental character; its history has been primarily Oriental and Semitic.

Building Trust and Brokering Interreligious and Intercultural Communication

There are certain essential processes that should be initiated to reconcile Western and Islamic identities and which could embody the formulation of -

• Alliances and coalitions with other American religious groups – specifically Jewish and Christian institutions. • A network of Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals, scholar, and religious leaders to participate in and in conjunction with accelerated efforts to design educational curricula for schools to build     informal communication links between existing American Muslim opinion leaders at home and abroad, while providing intellectual mentoring for the next generation of Islamic citizens; a unique alliance  that could work on harmonizing the values that attracted so many to the United States in the first place with the religious traditions that they cherish, and assist in the assimilation of new Muslim immigrants into American society.

The above support programs would be one of the most effective ways to wage war against terrorism.

Healing the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world involves eliminating the biggest obstacle to such healing - the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians is essential to building peace between the Islamic world and the United States. Peace would eliminate Muslim-Jewish religious antipathy and stem the rise of anti-Semitism in the world. Past American willingness to allow the Palestinian problem to fester indefinitely is interpreted by Muslims as a dismissive attitude that ignores the concerns of the global Muslim community.

A peace plan nurtured by the West must focus on alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian people and allowing them to live in dignity, freedom, and increasing prosperity, while also offering the Israelis the safety and security that they need to live their own lives in peace. By also focusing on increasing job opportunities and the prosperity of the individual family, such a plan could plant the seeds of a lasting peace.

America would reap an enormous outpouring of goodwill from the rest of the world if it exerted half the effort in building peace in Palestine that it used to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Above all, what is needed is an exciting and aggressive initiative to convince Muslims that America is serious about pursuing a mutually respectful relationship. The United States must exert its full moral force of its leadership to bring the parties together to put this conflict to rest, and bring more security to the rest of the world.

No amount of suicide bombings will drive Israel into the sea. Nor would one hundred years of targeted assassinations and home demolitions by Israel dry up the reservoir of young Palestinian recruits eager to join organizations such as Hamas. The callous hawkish policies of Israeli policymakers have further deepened the frustrations and sense of hopelessness that feed international terrorism, anti-Semitism in Europe and the Muslim world, and the growing Muslim perception of Jewish terrorism, which in turn has fueled an even greater cycle in terrorism committed in the name of Islam.

What Palestinians need and demand of Israel is dignity, while Israelis crave and need a long-term safe haven. Both sides are bitter about being deprived of the same need: a secure home. The Palestinians' overriding need is for what they have missed the most, the dignity of home and the actual ownership of ancestral lands, while Jews crave what they have most missed, multigenerational safety from annihilation.

The American Jewish community is the most important player on the field for Middle East peace. It knows how best to make a peace initiative the number one priority for leaders in the U.S. government and Congress. Through dialogue each side could explore what a secure home for each side would look like - Jews, Christians, and Muslims engaged in this exploration would be ideally poised to communicate their insights to American policymakers, and lobby the U.S. administration and Congress for the implementation of a politically workable framework for peace acceptable to each party.

Interfaith Dialogue

A series of specific roundtable dialogues between Muslim and Jewish secular and religious leaders would provide the opportunity to transcend superficialities. Such increased communication and understanding would benefit both Muslim and Jewish communities. For they are well aware that increasing numbers of their respective communities in the U.S. have become frustrated over the lack of resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and would like to see America playing a more decisive role in resolving it. By agreeing on certain key issues and speaking with a unified voice, American Jewish and Muslim leaders could have a powerful effect on steering American foreign policy toward a role of more engaged and credible peace building.

These series of interfaith dialogues, of which both secular and religious leaders would be invited, could include senior business, academic and community leaders of both communities, and could also include prominent Christian leaders and certain nongovernmental organizations, and renowned conflict resolution specialists with experience in Middle East peace. They would be aimed at building trust between Muslims and Jews, and entertain possibilities for just and secure solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; reviewing the same issues as discussed by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in the peace process, but they would do so from a fresh and perhaps less politically constrained perspective, one that might be helpful in filling in many of the still unmapped quadrants of any future road map to peace.

The structure already extant between Christians and Jews could serve as a model for dialogue with Muslims as well, especially in the Israeli-Palestinian issue. American Christians would do well to include Arab Christians in dialogue. Muslims see among both Jews and Christians some reluctance to acknowledge those communities of their own faith who live in parts of the Islamic world. Arab Christians would like to participate as equal partners in dialogue on Middle East issues, since many feel linked to Christians in the West through their religion as well as to the Muslim world through their culture. Sephardic Jews, who represent a minority among Ashkenazi Jewry of European descent, are also needed - and are eager to participate - in this dialogue. Arab Christians and Sephardic Jewry understand elements of both the Muslim world and the West and thus have a vital role to play in bridging the chasm between them.

However, interfaith dialogue is threatened by incendiary remarks about Islam made by leaders of the Christian right, like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham and others. Restraint from such remarks would definitely help to create a climate in which "fundamentalist" leaders on both sides might begin a process of trying to understand each other instead of hurling insults across the cultural chasm. Furthermore, Christian leaders who do not understand or even fear Islam would do well to engage local Muslim leaders in their hometowns in an open and good-spirited dialogue aimed at building trust and tolerance on both sides. Honoring the culture of others results in mutual honoring; dishonoring a culture results in mutual dishonoring.

Creating Bonding Forces

The journey toward achieving peace requires that we imagine what peace would look like between warring parties, that we know what we want to achieve and by when. Then we have to plan it and deploy enough force, energy, and skill to obtain it.

In the case between Israelis and Palestinians, growing economic bonds will create powerful bonding forces, through associational relationships - bonds created by business, trade, political, and professional ties - we can expect violence to subside. In the event of Middle East peace, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria are likely to become Israel's most important trading partners. These countries are likely to serve as locomotives of economic development of the Middle East because they maintain global relationships in the field of commerce, banking, and trade.

The same applies to the other major conflict areas in the Muslim world: Kashmir and Chechnya. India and Pakistan are likely to become each other's most important trading partners in the aftermath of any peace plan that sticks, and could become another economic union together with Kashmir and Bangladesh. What prevented the peoples of these conflicts from understanding how much they could benefit by cooperating with each other was their "preoccupation with differences", which prevented a pragmatic understanding of the mutual benefits from cooperation.

If all parties took a time-out from hostilities and focus on economic development and increasing bilateral trade, within a decade or two solutions will be found to the sources of conflict. History has proven that a critical mass of good business relationships can put conflict into a whole different perspective. This formula needs to be applied towards ending conflict, terrorism and extremism. Through the principle of trading power for desired assets, or in other words giving another person a certain amount of power over themselves as long as they are paid enough for the control they are giving up, relation¬ships can balance the right sum of power assets or economic assets. The limit to this formula is when the amount of money or power is enough to bend ethical boundaries. This relationship has implications for foreign policy.

In a nutshell, having democracy when your home lacks security, electricity, running water, and food is not as desirable an option for most people as living well even if under a less democratic regime.

A concerted program that brings together opinion leaders from individual Muslim countries together with scholars and elected leaders from the United States and other Western countries would need to focus on the challenge of adapting principles of democratic capitalism to Islamic cultures where such concepts are sometimes viewed as un-Islamic. The role of the U.S. would become one of catalyst and supporter for stimulating and nurturing a constructive new wave of good governance discussions in the Muslim world. Energies should be directed toward institution building: the design of institutions of democratic capitalism particularly suited to an Islamic culture.

Such institutions are specific organizations while others are background social and civil systems that underlie and support the functioning of a free society. They would embody a fair system of taxation, a free market economy with social safety nets, the rule of law and an independent judiciary, corporate and antitrust regulations to promote transparency and protect against monopolies, efficient capital markets, schools and educational systems, free news media, and systems for environmental preservation and the protection of minorities. In the past, the West has tried to implant such institutions into the developing world countless times and has done so usually in a rather patronizing manner that assumes the Western model will fit all cultures - which it rarely does. The results have been a disappointing and often dismal failure rate in institution building as well as increased Muslim humiliation.

Objectives of Interfaith Dialogue

In the eyes of God, people of all faiths share the same destiny. Interfaith dialogue engages in two primary dimensions: the vertical, which is about fathoming the different ways people understand and worship God, and the horizontal, which involves developing coalitions of the righteous across the religious spectrum to work together toward the betterment of society. This in turn would demonstrate that religion is not the root cause of conflict.

Throughout history, dialogue and interaction have existed between people of differing faiths, especially during the Crusades, when Christians were warring against Muslims. During the Islamic rule of Spain or al-Andulus, Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived together, worked together and shared an enlightened pluralistic and tolerant society. At a time when many believe there is a "clash of civilizations" between the West and the Muslim world, Muslims must challenge this belief through interfaith dialogue.

For interfaith dialogue to be properly defined, two ground rules must be observed first, compare equal to equal - let traditions be compared on an equal basis in a way that sees one form as similar to another; and second, allow each party to define itself to the others - let others define who they are and what they feel to the others, and refrain from defining the other's religion in a manner that falsely enhances our own values and superiority. In this way we would be able to reveal the fundamental truth of the commonalities of all human beings.

Dialogue among people of faith, and across differences, opens our hearts to one another as human beings, reveals what is common among us, and deepens our quests for enduring truth. Dialogue between religions offers the opportunity for uncovering the common ground of shared values and goals that resonate in each of our faiths, even as we clarify differences; it forges personal bonds and relationships of trust, which carry the potential to strengthen the larger social fabric and make possible cooperative efforts where concerns and priorities overlap, while contributing to an understanding and construction of a global notion of the common good.