AAM DISPATCH

Sheik Hassan Kinyua Omari talks on his cell phone in front of the memorial wall at the Memorial Park Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, the site of the former US Embassy that was bombed on August 7,1998. His uncle's name is among the 219 names engraved on the wall – 207 Kenyans and 12 Americans lost their lives that day.

“What do you want to talk to this guy for?” My cab driver waved his hand toward Sheik Hassan Kinyua Omari, who stood on the muddy corner we’d just pulled up to, wearing a matching white thawb and head cover. Hassan and the driver had spoken twice on my cell phone as we tried to locate the “Media House” where he was waiting for me. I thought the cab driver was surprised to see that the man on the other end of the line, who he’d been frustrated with for giving him “bad directions,” was a Muslim sheik.

More likely, Hassan told me later, he was surprised that an American was meeting up with a Muslim. “The Kenyan people,” he laughed, “they don’t understand. They think Muslims and Americans do not like each other.”

Because of his inter-faith work and his status among Muslims here, Hassan has become a de facto diplomat — a sort of token sheik — who US Embassy officials have called on in tense times. He is the Deputy Director of Religious Affairs of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims and is fluent in English, Kiswahili and Arabic. Just after the embassy was bombed in 1998, Hassan was asked to deliver a public prayer. (At the time, he was only about 20 years old).

“And for sure, they will be calling me tomorrow,” he said, smiling and knowingly pointing a finger in the air.

The front page of today’s Nation, Kenya’s largest newspaper, was dominated by the headline, “US dollars fueling Church campaign.” According to the report, the American Centre for Law and Justice, founded in 1990 by televangelist Pat Robertson (its Nairobi branch is called East Africa Centre for Law and Justice), has pledged tens of thousands of dollars to defeat the proposed constitution that allows abortion where the mother’s life is in danger… and (this is the part rubbing Muslims here the wrong way) that retains Muslim kadhis’ courts, which have limited authority to to arbitrate disputes between Muslims over marriage, divorce, or inheritance. Hassan expects he will be asked to help mitigate fears among Kenyan Muslims that this is more evidence of an American plot to wipe out Islam.

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Jordana Gustafson Africa, Global Health, Religion

In the United States it is common to take for granted a separation between church and state. But what does that separation mean, and how strictly should it be enforced? Is it possible for secular and religious authorities to interact in positive ways?

AAM’s Andrew Masloski speaks with author and journalist Ian Buruma. His newest book, Taming the Gods, explores the relationship between religion and democracy in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Watch >

Read highlights from the interview:

Masloski: You’ve said that religious faith is here to stay. What does that mean for democracy?

Baruma: Well it means the same thing it has always meant which is that a liberal democracy can only work if religious authority is separated from secular authority so that the source of truth is not the same as the source of secular power because otherwise it gets very dangerous…

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Javier Barrera Religion

Last month marked the 62^nd anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the world’s most influential champions of civil disobedience.

While it can be argued that Gandhi essentially molded his own religious tradition over the course of his life, it’s important to look at the Hindu and Jain influences that he incorporated in his own philosophy that mobilized the Indian independence movement over half a century ago.

Gandhi, a Hindu by birth who was also largely influenced by the Jain religious tradition, prescribed to the central doctrine of nonviolence, or ahimsa. The principle of the “golden rule” was actually taught in Hindu scripture long before it was preached in the rabbinic and Christian eras.

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Ilana Weinberg Religion

Just returning to a snow covered DC from four days in the greater Detroit area, where I traveled with our partner Mithat Bereket, leading host for Turkey’s public television station TRT, to film a documentary on Islam in America. Michigan has one of America’s largest, and one of the world’s most diverse, Muslim populations. Ranging from Arab American to African American, Sunni to Shia, recent immigrant to third generation, you’d be hard pressed to find a Muslim community not represented in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. We barely scratched the surface of the Bangladeshi, Yemeni, or South Asian communities. But I did manage to get a close look at two vastly different Muslim communities.

On Saturday we spent most of our day with Imam Abdullah El Amin and his congregation at the Muslim Center of Detroit. After leaving our hotel in suburban Dearborn, and navigating the tangled web of freeways in the heart of Ford country, we arrive at an unassuming white brick building in a dilapidated neighborhood of urban Detroit.

Many of the surrounding houses are windowless and boarded up, and the ‘main streets’ in the area are a wasteland of “Coney Island’ fast food establishments, car dealerships, businesses and restaurants which look as though they’ve been out of business for years. We walk into the masjid, which serves the largest congregation of African American Muslims in the area, and are greeted warmly by several members of the congregation eager to share their mosque with a Turkish television audience. The Muslim Center, which was originally a bank before being incorporated as a mosque in 1985, seems more of a community center than a mosque. While they gather for prayer five times a day, their Saturday is also brimming with community service activity.

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Ilana Weinberg America, Detroit, Islam, Muslims, Religion

James Cameron’s “Avatar” has become a worldwide phenomenon, with a plethora of awards and nominations, and a box office record of over $1.8 billion, making it the highest grossing movie ever. However, the story woven around the natives of Cameron’s fictional planet “Pandora” has been reinvented and retold in Hollywood for decades, but at its heart is the history of the Native Americans and their core belief in the sanctity of Mother Earth.

One of Avatar’s pivotal scenes depicts the N’avi gathered around the “Tree of Souls,” ceremoniously attempting to bring Sigourney Weaver’s character back to life.  The ceremony bears a striking resemblance to the traditional Native American Ghost Dance, which began with the vision of a Paiute Indian during an eclipse of the sun, and became a central ritual among many of the Plains tribes.  The tribes who practiced the Ghost Dance ritual believed that if they danced and chanted together with enough intensity, the earth would turn upside down, the non-native invaders would be destroyed, and the sanctity of the earth would be restored.  With the restoration of the earth, the souls of all American Indians would be reunited, free of death and disease, and their land would be rightly returned.

Ilana Weinberg, AAMTV producer and journalist, will begin a series of posts on religion and peace-building. Her next post will be on Hinduism.

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Ilana Weinberg Environment, Religion

President Obama’s credo of a “new beginning” between the US and the Muslim world is one of the US’s most innovative cornerstones in foreign policy. The State Department just published its 2009 annual report on international religious freedom. The report was presented by Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton and Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Michael Posner stressing the report was published in the “spirit of dialogue and cooperation.”

Currently, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a 56-nation consortium of Islamic nations, is pressing the UN Human Rights Council to adopt a resolution broadly denouncing the defamation of religion. This effort is regarded as a reaction to perceived anti-Islamic incidents such as the publication of Islam-critical cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 causing outrage among Muslims worldwide.

At the presentation of the report, Clinton expressed that she “strongly disagrees” with such efforts to implement anti-defamation policies, saying they would restrict freedom of expression and religion. From the AP:

The best antidote to intolerance is not the defamation of religion’s approach of banning and punishing offensive speech, but rather a combination of robust legal protections against discrimination and hate crimes, proactive government outreach to minority religious groups, and a vigorous defense of both freedom of religion and expression.

Referring to Obama’s Cairo speech and his “new beginning” policy, Clinton stressed that freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. Therefore, the 2009 report has a special focus on efforts to promote interfaith dialogue and tolerance. “These important efforts built on the shared values and common concerns of faith communities to achieve lasting peace.”

Regarding recent developments on religious freedom, Posner stated he sees a mixed picture of positive and negative trends. He mentioned a rising consciousness in the world for the necessity of interfaith exchange and cooperation.

There really is a sense of a growing recognition that there needs to be more dialogue and more effort across faiths to figure out where is common ground, where are differences and how do we navigate those differences.

Assistant Secretary Posner added that religion-based violence doesn’t only happen in the Middle East. Violence also occurs in the US and Europe, citing two examples: an Egyptian woman murdered by a racist perpetrator in a German courthouse and the murder of a guard in the Washington DC Holocaust Museum by a radical anti-Semite.

He also mentioned that blasphemy laws and tremendous inter-faith tensions in the Central Asian republics are increasingly posing stronger restrictions on religious groups and their rights to register or receive funds.

Learn more about the US’s interest in promoting international religious freedom, listen to The First Freedom.

Martin Herzer Religion

This month, as Vietnam assumes the Presidency of the UN Security Council in New York, the AP reports continuing conflicts back home between Vietnamese police and followers of the superstar Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) took the opportunity to highlight what they see as Vietnam’s continued human-rights abuses, particularly in the realm of religious freedom.

The commission writes that:

…religious freedom conditions have not improved since Vietnam joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) and have deteriorated for some religious groups and the human rights lawyers who try to protect them…

As America Abroad explored in The First Freedom, Vietnam has become something of a Rochard test for how you view the struggle to advance International Religious Freedom. Many point to the end of violent forced renunciations of faith and the release of religious activists from Vietnamese prisons as evidence of monumental progress. Yet there are those, including the folks at USCIRF, who argue that despite these first steps, the Communist government of Vietnam still has many miles to go.

The Commission has called for the Obama Administration to turn up the heat by placing Hanoi back on the list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) – that’s among the strongest sticks available to the US government in the decade-old International Religious Freedom legislation. But that move seems unlikely, since Vietnam essentially worked their way off the CPC list three years ago. And the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom champions the case of Vietnam as a prime example of the effectiveness of IRF diplomacy.

To see an interactive map of USCIRF Countries of Concern, go here.

Matt Ozug Religion, Vietnam

This past June, President Obama delivered his address to the Muslim World from Cairo. It was no accident that it emphasized the principle of religious freedom. From Obama’s speech:

The richness of religious diversity must be upheld – whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt. And fault lines must be closed among Muslims as well, as the divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence, particularly in Iraq. Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it.

In recent years, the Middle East has seen growing sectarian conflict, and a rising tide of extremists promoting a bloody and intolerant form of Islam. This issue of religious liberty extends far beyond the Muslim world. Religious persecution is on the rise around the globe, from Russia and India to swaths of sub-Saharan Africa.

But why is religious freedom so important to the US? Tom Farr served as the first director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom. That office was set up just over a decade ago after Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act—which made the promotion of religious freedom a component of US foreign policy. Listen to an excerpt from America Abroad’s latest program, The First Freedom.

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Javier Barrera International Politics, Religion

At the recent “Strategic and Economic Dialogue” in Washington, DC, high-level Chinese and American officials met for two days of talks on a range of important issues. The meetings, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, covered a variety of hefty topics including climate change, counterterrorism, and global economic recovery. And as is often the case when high-level meetings between American and Chinese officials take place, many were listening for mention of one issue in particular—human rights. Here’s what President Obama said in his opening remarks:

Just as we respect China’s ancient and remarkable culture, its remarkable achievements, we also strongly believe that the religion and culture of all peoples must be respected and protected, and that all people should be free to speak their minds. And that includes ethnic and religious minorities in China, as surely as it includes minorities within the United States.

Support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in America. Our nation is made up of immigrants from every part of the world. We have protected our unity and struggled to perfect our union by extending basic rights to all our people. And those rights include the freedom to speak your mind, to worship your God, and to choose your leaders. There are not things we seek to impose— this is who we are.

Raising the issue of human rights with China was a delicate task at an event designed to strengthen US-China cooperation on a range of important issues, and especially at a time when China is the world’s largest shareholder of American debt. As a result, President Obama was careful not to seem to be imposing American ideals upon the Chinese. But many had hoped the President would take a tougher line. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) was among those disappointed with the level of attention paid to human rights during the talks:

I think the Obama Administration is AWOL on human rights. And with all do respect, I think the Congress, maybe both political parties, are actually AWOL on human rights. But the conditions in China for human rights or religious freedom are worse today than they have been in the last ten years…And the Obama Administration, if you looked at the report that came out the other day, they just had this joint meeting with Secretary Clinton and Secretary of the Treasury Geithner with the Chinese – it was economics, economics, economics. And no real discussion on human rights, religious freedom. And so I think it’s perhaps the debt that we have where we’re so indebted to the Chinese, they’re buying our paper, our currency, but the Administration doesn’t talk very much about human rights, doesn’t do anything with regard to it and I think there’s less interest unfortunately in the Congress than I’ve seen for a long, long while.

A press release issued at the end of the two days of talks said that both sides “discussed ways to enhance mutual understanding and positive cooperation on human rights issues through our Human Rights Dialogue and other initiatives on the basis of equality and mutual respect” and that they would seek to hold the next Human Rights Dialogue before the end of the year. But to some human rights advocates, the fact that human rights were not afforded the same prominence as the other issues discussed at the “Strategic and Economic Dialogue” was still a disappointment.

Monica Bushman China, Congress, Economy, Human Rights, International Politics, Religion, State Department

We’ve been ramping up work on our September radio program on international religious freedom in the past week. One of my colleagues has just arrived in Pakistan and another has just returned from Vietnam, and those of us that have stayed on solid ground have been interviewing all sorts of people who have somehow worked on or been touched by this issue—from architects of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act to people who have fled religious persecution and resettled in the US.

One man we spoke with, a Muslim Uyghur from Xinjiang Province in western China talked about how he came to a small town in Tennessee to study journalism and began to write about his own experiences and the oppression of the Uyghurs—and more than 10 years later, he has yet to return home and says that he can never go back now that he is a recognized dissident.

I’ve been working on a video-web feature on the situation of the Baha’is in Iran, and in the last few days, I’ve met with several Iranian Baha’is who have had to leave home—one who paid smugglers to take him to Pakistan after his father was executed and another who was imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison as a young teen.

The common theme in these stories of religious persecution has been a loss of home—leaving, and never returning. There’s no question, if you ask these people, and anyone who enjoys practicing their religion openly and unfettered, why religious freedom is important, crucial, even, to living a healthy fulfilling life—and why it’s not something to be taken for granted. In fact, many Americans know religious freedom as the “first freedom,” the foundation for all other freedoms and a cornerstone of the campaign for human rights.

At the personal level, it’s not hard to understand why this issue is important, and why it touches a nerve with many, from government officials to churchgoers. The US has enshrined the promotion of religious freedom into law, and it’s been an official component of US foreign policy for more than a decade now. But how successful has America been in this goal? And how much can it hope to achieve given the trade-offs—pushing for religious freedom in China versus fostering economic ties and good relations with Beijing?

We’ll explore these and other questions in the show, coming out the first week of September.

Monica Villavicencio China, Pakistan, Religion, Vietnam