good evening ladies and gentlemen and on behalf of the belmont against racism the belmont human rights commission the belmont religious council the temple sent a social action committee and the first church in belmont unitarian universalists social action committee i welcome you to our evening of muslims in america hearing their story my name is dr david al gore and i'm the proud member of both the belmont religious council and your host this evening here the bethel temple center the evening is going to run i think quite interestingly quite energetically we're looking for a fifteen minute introductions from each of our distinguished guests here and then we will open up the floor for questions and hopefully you'll have some go insisted mulay conversation i do want to recognize a couple of folks that are extra special joining us this evening we have the german deputy co and our state senator will brownsburg thank you all for joining nairobi kenya he is currently a professor into muslim and islam a religion and culture after completing his high school education in kenya he attended harvard university with a concentration in comparative studies of religion graduating s seven seven hundred he is now teaching courses on various aspects of the islamic tradition including understanding islam and contemporary muslim societies and religion literature in the arts and muslim culture particularly active post september nine eleven in improving the understanding of islam and its role in muslim societies professor  an interfaith youth leadership program in collaboration with the american defamation league dr ross we currently serves on the leadership committee of the way in western interfaith action council he currently lives in weston and now works in manchester to my far left we have attorneys shannon irwin who is a co founder and current executive director of the muslim justice league and attorney and printmaker by training but turney shannon received a b f a from the university of pennsylvania in conjunction with pennsylvania academy of fine arts before converting to islam in two thousand and seven and earning her j d from harvard law school her legal studies focused on immigration law and human rights and included research in occupy palestine prior to enter j l shannon worked with massachusetts law reform institute and with the massachusetts immigrant and refugee advocacy coalition where she directed the state and local level policy campaigns she's a former president of the board of directors of the new england muslim bar association and currently serves on the board of directors of the american civil liberties union here in massachusetts again attorney   good evening everyone can you hear me yes yeah but first i wanted to say thank you very much to the organizers of this event for putting this event together first because these are important  conversations and then second for inviting me to share my perspectives each of us comes from very different backgrounds and so i'm actually looking forward to see what the others have to say but i'm going to talk about things from my particular perspective so it's most a few have heard i'm a scholar of religion and i'm often invited to talk about islam non muslims have wanted to know why muslims have wondered why some americans and europeans have espoused policies and attitudes that have been taken istic to muslim interests in an atmosphere rampant with stereotypes of the other i've been engaged in providing audiences with religious historical perspective on the complex factors that have created such deep and profound ok why do they hate the us seems to be the question that both sides of audiences that i feel that i talk to have on their mind what is ironic in this polarization that is that we are witnessing that we live in a world of globalization characterized by greater contact between peoples of different cultures religions than any any other point in history and exposure to diversity has not resulted in better understanding that's the irony instead our world is marked with greater misunderstanding and escalating levels of tensions and conflicts between cultures and people some people have characterized this this as a clash of civilizations that as nations in the west and everywhere around the world have become multicultural multi religious multiethnic different civilisations have come into contact with each other and because they are living in close proximity they say there's a clash because the values are different in the ideals are different and certainly there's people who talk about this clash others however have talked about what for me makes more sense what is the clash of ignorance  that what we're really witnessing is this clash of ignorance is that for me as an educator this is a very interesting thing because one of the things i notice in america and in europe and so on is that these countries have become in the last thirty forty years fifty years have become multicultural multiethnic so they have become pluralist in their make up for a variety of reasons but they've not become pluralist in their spirit so this idea is that created we have all these staver city but we're not having a sense of belonging which seems to me a problem so one of the key reasons for this i think is that people don't have the tools to engage with different to engage with and understand different and when it comes to religion which for many people is a big taboo subject you don't want to talk about religion but when it comes to religion we are confronted with what i call a global illiteracy about the nature of religion so this religious illiteracy i'm defining as the inability to conceive of religion as a phenomena that is intricately embedded in cultural complex cultural context so that religion is not just about faith belief and doctrines or ritual or scriptures religion is very deeply influenced by historical political economic circumstances so how person read scripture is based not just on their religious doctrine but the lived realities of real life their educational background their social background and so on and because of this illiteracy people are unable to appreciate the role that political economic social logical factors play in shaping what our overtly seen as religious expression religious illiteracy from my perspective is a direct consequence of the failure of educational systems around the world to provide students with opportunities to engage critically with the economic study of religion i'm not talking about faith based education but we need to understand this phenomena of religion and when people don't understand the phenomena of religion the consequences are grim so for example in a democracy where you have a multi religious multi ethnic democracy if people don't understand their neighbors who are different than themselves they're filled ignorance predates prejudice it breeds fear and ultimately leads to democracy for democracy is to be strong you have to have respect and trust between citizens that's the foundation of democracy and this religious illiteracy and there are other little but this religious illiteracy has been very damaging because if you're afraid of your neighbor who is across the street who is different than you are it is it is in fact weakening the fabric of democracy religious illiteracy also can threaten democracy because people who feel marginalized they don't feel that they belong in society because they are  discriminated against or they feel prejudice those people who look for other forms of identity so sometimes people say why is it that all these people in europe are getting radicalized now i'm not excusing that their behaviors and so on but there are social logical reasons when people feel excluded from society a society that's pluralistic it's makeup but not in its spirit and they feel excluded they're going to look for other sources of relegation of who i am and what i belong in this i think leads to sometimes radicalization religious illiteracy also breeds fundamentalism and extremism because if people are ignorant about their own traditions and its histories and its development and its scriptures they're not too they can be swayed by demagogues to accept intolerant interpretation sometimes that are made paid for political gain but also damage democracy so what is what for me one of these issues is what we are facing here today is a combination of issues but from my perspective this religious illiteracy from a certain is is very risky i think another element in this and they're connected is the battle to define what is america what it means to be american i think that there are people who are defining america in a very exclusivist way based on race and religion and then but there's this other strand in american history of of accepting the rights to be different and you see this in the smoke of it pluribus you in our diversity we are united so what i see is happening from my perspective these two things going on simultaneously this religious a little and they feed off each other and this battle and that's why this muslim and illiteracy about islam and illiteracy about muslims and the other ring muslims because that's the other thing that illiteracy leads to other stereotypes prejudice and if it goes unchecked as we know in history it leads to genocide it leads to holocaust when people don't accept the humanity of what the people so what so i think these two issues from my perspective are are and so with that i'm going to stop and then turn it over to my colleagues and then i look forward to the question and second will be about the current topic of islamophobia so when i migrated here i was very fortunate to have finished medical school at the age of twenty and only because of a position of color and the examiner who failed me was the head examiner and was well known for his feeling against foreign graduates so that was my first by a committee at massachusetts general hospital where the committee met and i got a very nice letter in the mail saying that i had been to many surgeries of one type and they would like to follow my trends and practice to investigate which way it goes before they allow me to the college which was also because of racism and then there was another incident i don't want to waste time going into details but personally i suffered from these things many times never having failed before this started and then when i started having children and my kids started to grow up were born and brought up in western where i lived and things were fine until nine eleven and it was interesting that you know for various reasons i dissipated in interfaith dialogue for forty years i started on my own and joined different organisations and i belong to probably twenty or thirty committees and groups in the greater country once i had children most people feel it becomes necessary to decide what we're going to bring up bring them up as religious kids or are they going to follow their own method so it was after nine eleven when they my children started to hear comments about go back where you came from and you know laughingly they used to say i came from western so that's where i'm going back but you  know it hurt their feelings there was no question that they even though they took it lightly and didn't want to make a big deal out of it but not only at school but even on the street you know a car going by some time to slow down and go back to where you came from and it started happening more when my children i have two daughters and when they started to become more conservative and  covering their heads so they were very easily recognized as who they were so that these kind of remarks increased tremendously after that  we as a family have discussions about what's the best way to handle that and we know the best way to handle it is be ignoring because as the professor just said it's unfortunately ignorance that causes these kind of issue s sorry so in relationship to that one of my colleagues who has been speaking recently at different places different libraries and schools went to hopkin on and spoke and one of the high school students handed her a poem he wrote and i just wanted to read that to you to conclude my remarks and it's very  this topic the title is the phobia of ignorance this do not fear those who are differing those of a fifth misconceived as terrorism a fate of peace and tolerance fate as common as brown eyes of fate similar to your own fate only known for their radical is for i feared those who are the same constructing a supremacist society roping people further into the hatred of individual ism off of a misunderstanding i fear those who believe that there are limitations to freedom limitations to the land of the free and equal rules of who is allowed a chance i fear those only capable of seen the worst categorizing one religion with extremists i fear those who cannot see past the blindness of their misconceptions i fear those who do not kno good evening thank you so much for having me here tonight this is an ok volume of folks louder i'll try wave at me if i forget so again my name is shannon erwin and i'm a co founder and executive director of the muslim justice league a boston based muslim led and driven organization advocating for human and civil rights that are being eroded under national security pretexts and i'm so thrilled to be a part of this discussion it was in the treating theme for me muslims in america sharing or hearing their story and part of what's intriguing is the fact of our diversity of our heterogeneity right as every faith group is muslims are an incredibly diverse group and i certainly couldn't presume to give our story but i can give a little bit about my story and one little statistic that i think is interesting that i'm very proud of i think a lot of us are apparently with the second most racially diverse religion in the country second only to seventh day adventists it's a point from pew research so that's pretty cool but in terms of what it means to me to be a muslim in america today there's an acute awareness of our suspect community status there's an awareness of the ways that a movement of authoritarianism and militarism is leveraging that status to do harm to our entire country and world and there's also a deep gratitude for those who recognize what's happening and stand up and stand with us and a gratitude for the ability to stand with other suspect communities and to build power together because of course we may be one primary target community but we're not the only ones in how clearly black are and have been for many many decades and centuries facing extraordinarily extraordinary violence and dehumanization tino's are facing families separation through the immigration enforcement machine and we can learn from one another and and support one another and shallow but we founded the muslim justice league in response to one particularly troubling development locally here that i wanted to share with you on the one year anniversary of the  boston marathon bombing a national security adviser to president obama came to the harvard kennedy school her name is lisa monaco and she announced that boston would be the site of a department of homeland security liaison or actually she was the word on voice on countering violent extremism which sounds great right who could possibly oppose countering violent extremism as a violent extremism is a very bad sounding thing but the more that we learned about this program and the more that we understood based on how it's operated in the united kingdom the more concerned we were and as monaco and her remarks expressed to folks who were gathered that the things that they wanted people to look out for in terms of potential extremism were subtle not necessarily things like talk of engaging in plots or planning a crime but things like children becoming oppositional with their parents or her religious leaders in those disagreements in their congregations so we all know that those occurrences are incredibly rare and it will be easy to spot but industry mess but we were concerned that giving institutionalized bullying against muslim students students as young as four years old sometimes have been subjected to interventions as potential extremists in this program for either acting appropriately as a four year old should or for being noticeably muslim similarly in the health sector doctors and counsellors have been required to report potential extremist behavior or rather even opinions so to enquire about their patients positions on things that have nothing to do with the ailment that brought them in to see their doctor and that obviously undermines the client and so the doctor patient relationship it's a road of confidentiality  deep concerns about what this program will do to free speech in our society and to confidence in our democracy as it's really harmed the u k in those regards and we were troubled to hear that our executive office of health and human services  agreed to work with federal prosecutors to deploy the program in massachusetts so that is a primary focus of our efforts right now i'm happy to speak more with folks at the end if you'd like to know more or during humanae but i guess i would think again with the perspective of gratitude first that you have all come out today that shows that you clearly care deeply about what's happening in our communities and want to be a part of the solution and also a  white privilege and hat but in spite of that fact there's a there's a privilege in being able to advocate on issues that we know we're really only the canary in the coal mine right where the currents target but ultimately these practices that are being tested on a marginalized community will impact all of us one day and so it's really our responsibility to take action now feel free to ask your questions whether for an individual for the panel with large what i would do is let me start with a question that was submitted if i bet and i will throw this out to all three of you out of public officials police department school authorities and others in positions of influence been reacting to disparage but the citizens who are under political attack you have thirty seconds to decide what the response that well two things are happening one is obviously there are people like you all who are responding but institutionalize to the public is responding but institution wise it's very difficult to get a positive response because people are very comfortable talking about racism or gender discrimination but when it comes to religion they don't want to really recognize an as a category of discrimination i was recently in canada in ontario i was consulting with the government there and the ontario human rights commission has actually introduced a new category of human rights it's called faith as a it faces them as people who believe they're being discriminated against because they're religious and when you you know so i think that there is this ambiguity here  because of race they know how to act gender they know how to act but religion we don't know what to around and the confusion i'd also read another book where the person had confronted and escaped from what seemed to be profoundly fundamentalist islam and i couldn't after reading ha it was so bad i thought to myself there's no way there's going to be any kind of reproach mind here and all these people are so foreign so i went to the qur'an and i went in with some very obvious biases i was looking for problem and i didn't find them i was i'm perplexed because i don't know whether i missed them whether it was a function of the translation the translator made it very clear that arabic has changed their words have multiple meanings he often footnoted the text so if the translator has an agenda then clearly this could have come into what i was reading but did i miss something here because i did not i mean all was not sweetness and light obviously there were things that bothered me but i did not see any justification for what these people are doing in the koran where is it where are they coming from so i think this goes back to this issue about how we think about religion think you can take any scripture  you know what i call cherry picking you can go and take worse is from the bible or worse is from the koran intake here it is the evidence and that's what some people have done and and so some people today osama is a religion of peace and look at all these peaceful verses and some people say slam is a religion of violence and look at all these texts there are certain verses that they refer to which are a small number in the entire text but the zero in on them because they're convinced that religion is the factor of rep excellent excellent explanation that how do you explain the behavior of people it's because of their religion made them do this that is one of the signs of illiteracy when you think that religion makes somebody do something because human beings are very complex and they're not just driven by their religion they're driven by their political ignagni social context and those contexts interpret influence how they interpret religion so i would say that when you're talking about scripture we have to be very clear that we're not taking like a seventh century text the meaning so it fits into our contemporary times and then say this is why things are happening because it's much more complicated than that and i just wanted to add here i want you to think about how for example in early twentieth century america the bible was interpreted by the klan to justify racism and the fact that they saw african americans as some human it was all based on interpretation of the bible at the same time you had african americans using the same scripture and seen it as a scripture of hope freedom and salvation so i think that when you're talking about religion we have to first of all i think what you did but you have to look at the ethos of the whole tradition you can't share because these crown is revealed over some twenty something years you're people who seek justification for power had too many in scripture that's what leads people to read scripture that way so that's how i understand this issue of scripture being used in contradictory to be assassinated and he had to run for his life all the time and that's what led to his migration from mecca medina but he faced several instances when people were out to get him and the koran was revealed as the professor said over twenty three years and a lot of verses refer to certain situations for which it right but the thing is that you know koran is chronic arabic is so difficult to interpret and understand i have read the koran a number of times i don't know arabic but i i don't understand it fully and every time i read it i learn something new so i'm really amazed at this number of folks who have studied and learned with such clarity that they can pick out these things of you know violent verses from the horror so it's i should probably go to learn from them which i would just underscore a point that professor sunny made then you know when we when we try to understand these conflicts these  movements are ultimately they they are political in nature even if they use a cloak of religious language to galvanize folks right and that's not on president and not on like other arms movements  and it you know perhaps we've we've also heard from folks in areas that are most impacted by i says for example folks in iraq and syria that they don't they oftentimes don't even believe that the members of these groups are ideologically motivated they often came from previous groups with completely different so called ideologies but maybe opportunists who are trying to advance i would like to ask a question that attorney earl alluded to in your comments i was raised a baptist and anybody who's been raised baptist knows that there are fourteen thousand different kinds of baptist religions but in there is clearly no single christian religion but we seem to always hear about the muslim religion can you  you further address the this when i assume is a diversity within the muslim religion please you want to you know i'm not a islamic scholar so i'm not going to get so much into the scholarly differences i would say that there are a number of different schools of islamic thought but beyond that there's also enormous racial diversity national origin diversity and within our own muslim communities we are really grappling and trying to do better in terms of addressing intra community racism and just be honest right so we have  incredibly well rooted established impressive black indigenous would call them muslim community indigenous and that they are not immigrants in boston probably about a third of the population although we don't have exact statistics and we have wonderful historic predominately black mosques and boston and when we hear though about muslims with a capital and in media oftentimes people equate that with folks who are arab right or from the middle east at least and that can feel very kind and i'm speaking as a white woman i recognize this is problematic but knowing from my black friends that i speak with i can feel like a ratio to our black muslim communit they have a lot to contribute they are in some ways the most historic islam in this country because africans who were brought over and enslaved were in many cases muslim so this is not a new religion to our country so i would just mention the racial diversity is an important component and of course we have you know but you know converts we have a large number of folks from asia including east asia indonesia being one of the largest or the largest muslim country in the world as you probably know and i will leave it to my distinguish the a couple of things i would like to point out one is that there are some basic what you might have heard as the five pillars of islam and those five pillars minor differences and a lot of sins islamists there are one point six billion muslims in the world and it's spread out every corner of the world there are a lot of cultural influences on the religion and i came from india and there's so many things from hindu ism that have crept into this town some of the practices so those are different but the basic fundamentals professor can add to that the same for the fa right so a very important question because i think this is one of the big misunderstandings that people have when people talk about the muslim community you know as a scholar i want to bristol no there isn't one muslim community here like it's that just isn't one christian community or one treats its diversity but i always tell my students that when anyone says so two things that i t one is that when everyone said islam doesn't say or do anything islam is not a person it's a conception nobody has seen islam say or do anything nobody seen christianity say or do anything people conceptualize islam or conceptualize christianity in a certain way so you can have many different conceptualizations and what i asked them is that you should when you hear islam says this or somebody saying this about islam you'll say ok which islam is this one and what context is it yes there are certain but there are also important definite differences that you need to recognize and engage with sometimes i think muslims don't engage enough with the different but the other thing that i wanted to mention here especially going back to the issue of the  now as somebody who studied from an academic perspective the development of the tradition most people are surprised to know that the word islam and the word muslim in the koran islam has not been the name of a religion as we're using it today islam means the act of submission to god and muslim is anyone who submit to god and with that understanding you have what the prophet muhammad was preaching was not seen as something foreign it was the same message of submission that abraham moses jesus and so on so all these figures that have venerated in these traditions are called in the qur'an muslims even the mother mary the mother of jesus is called muslim so this category muslim in the koran is very broad and inclusive and construction and then there is this what i would say faith based so you know i was really tempted when mr trump said oh no more muslims in the united states i said yeah so according to the american since i see a smile i'll start with  how it's about our american muslims and i would say just the right amount to each his own we have a range of levels of observance some folks are incredibly observant some folks are quite towards the secular end of the spectrum may have more to say about that but in terms of can a muslim be a loyal american i'm guessing that was maybe a tongue in cheek question  intended to provoke some discussion absolutely yes i am struggling to even elaborate on that answer you know muslims today are just are chinese trope is first and it can be applied to anybody but there is absolutely nothing about muslims that makes us less than other americans  yeah exactly so one of the basic teachings of islam is that you are most of the abrahamic religions is that you can't be judgmental so you can't say who is more muslim than another who's more christian or jewish than another so we you know no practicing muslim should really answer that question because you don't want to be passing judgment on someone secondly as far as being devout instance  i remember distinctly the one nine hundred seventy two i enlisted for the vietnam war after finishing my training because i knew i was going to get drafted and it you know it just happened that they  turned me down because they said i was overqualified for what they were looking  for i would definitely give my life for my country there's absolutely no question about it yeah i totally agree with this issue of the wildness like how do you know i mean how do you out of christians in this country or how do you know i think it's very difficult to generalize about all these things but i do want to say this thing about muslims being the other of america that as we were already seen lots of groups have gone there what i find problematic in american history is our ideas of nationalism are always being assumed the has to be other and this is nationalism that is constructed on exclusiveness you it in europe as well it's very dangerous because it is more dangerous i think there's more violence that has been created by nationalism that other rises people then there has been in the name of religion you think about the first world war the second world war you think about you know the holocaust you think about so many horrendous things have happened in the name of exclusivist forms of nationalism so i think this is something that's very important and what i find is there's a contradiction here is that in america we have exclusivist forms of nationalism and then thank god we have forms of national and this is the big struggle how do we define ourselves as a nation where we come to terms with and engage and accept difference so that the loyalty of somebody to the nation is not based on their faith or their race or their gender or whatever you know everyone has a right to be an american citizen and you have to be able to accept that there are different ways of being american in terms of your experience of shannon brought up an interesting point when she was talking about how there was a woman from the obama administration they came and wanted to start an envoy and we were going to look at people is suspect this room is full of people him and many of are activists in our community and we don't just come to hear you talk we actually with like to get involved and so if we could do something if there's people you want to have to contact if there's places you want to stick go and stand outside as people that are muslim but that support you we want to do that because my fear is what's happening is that we're all in a learn a lot here and we're going to say we're totally on board but it must we actually do something unless there's different color faces there is a group that's going to feel or dislike or fear and fear brings out different people we have to all be one family and we have to go together so all signed in and we've got e mail addresses make sure you're in touch with so that we can help right right  oh thank you i appreciate that so much and i should've left out our own muslim justice league list serv sign in sheets but what i'll do is i'll run out quickly when this ends and put them on the table if people want to sign up on your way out we have actions that people can take and regular updates their one very simple one that you don't have to be on our lip service to talk to know about if you go to our facebook page muslim justice league the believe it's probably about the third posting down after our hotline for f b i representation after  time line for surveillance there's a online petition secretaries others requesting that just not participate in this profiling program that i mentioned we're deeply concerned that it's is that the unfavorable deal of muslims in america is eighty three percent so we have a real bottom and when i talk to them all you need to do is if each one of you toward one other person who feels differently it will make a big difference so it doesn't doesn't have to be a formal session but if anybody if you correct somebody who's saying something which is false that we very helpful  and i would also say and this is i think coming on to a human rights issue is you know every human being has multiple identities religion is one race is another gender is another and so on but when you categorize a human being with multiple identities and you see this human being true just one dimension it's dangerous and i want denying muslims the multiplicities of their identities and viewing them you need dimensionally just through the lens of religion this is the big problem this is i think a problem with state institutions and f beings which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence so when you see somebody just on the basis of their religion you've stripped them of their humanity and that i think we have to be very careful in that this is what i think state institutions and government yes i understand the issues of security and so on and so forth but i'm also aware that when you see somebody just on the basis of their religion you're denying them the gautrain islam has gone if they're you trying to use the christian model of reformation no because we're not christianity and we don't have a church and we don't have papacy so we cannot going to have reformation christian style but if you study the history of islam all through the centuries they will always be in trends of reformation and of of change because religious traditions respond to the change situations that people find themselves in and some of the refrain from asian movements that have happened are actually have not actually led to very pleasant results for example hobby that's a reformation movement which i think was an attempt to reform islam but has been very dangerous then they've been other forms of reforms that are very progressive but wary interesting lee people don't hear about them there's silence because they're progressive and this against fits in with stereotypes about what i called silent islam in loudest the silent islam is the islam of people of faith who practice their faith their devotion silently they're not looking for exposure in the media and so on this is a slam of fa mom that is getting coverage in the media and the silent islam the silence the islam of ethics morality and so on that affects the lives of millions of people around the world people know very little about this is what i mean about illiteracy only people knew about some of the traditions of peacemaking for example or ethics and morality and so on that would be important but so there have been traditions of reform i would say try out the centuries but some of these traditions of reform have not received the attention they need to receive one quick example sisters in islam a group in malaysia is doing marvelous work in confronting patriarchal interpretations of islam but you never hear about them in the media because it's assumed that islam is against the rights of women so this is what i mean that you know there is this so there has been reform but we just don't that from a public perception there's very little information about that so i think we also face this issue for knowledge gap huge knowledge gap which comes down to education i am i'm certainly not as knowledgeable about these developments as professor sonnie but i would say that even in my time as a muslim i have observed that our religion is not static and like all religions it is evolving and growing but i would say that i find it deeply troubling that a state leader or politician would take it upon himself to inform our community that we need to fix our religion our reform our religion both because that is incompatible with our ideals in this country of religious freedom and  church and state separation but also because it's you know it's a very convenient way to avoid looking at some of the areas where a state leader might have more ability to promote peace perpetuates  fallacy that we were talking about earlier that people commit violence because of religion rather than that religion is sometimes used as an excuse to unite folks for you know a particular political campaign or objective you know there are things that our politicians and state leaders could do to promote peace including you know look at our role in perpetuating conflicts work to uphold international human rights and accountability work to pursue diplomacy even with groups that we really despise height and that would go a lot further than telling a marginalized religious group that they need to fix themselves i just wanted to all times and that's why he's known as the seal of the prophets and one of the fascinating things as i said earlier that i learn more and more as i study the koran is that there is a chapter in koran which gives  of embryology and this was fourteen hundred years ago so i imagine in a sense we believe that it's a word of god that has not changed i'm not surprised at that and the same thing if you read the koran in certain parts it talks about space travel and there are scientists and i as a scientist you know can appreciate that so as part of the reformation is concerned i think if people bring back what koran has asked them to do that will be a big step like koran was the first scripture that gave equal rights to women and the prophet mohammad what it is famous sayings is that heaven is under the feet of your mother not your father so people need to learn that and practice ok i would say yeah i mean the you know the american muslims are the most diverse muslim community in the world right the communities in america are you share you have sunni predominantly they're they're sunni but the share here and there are lots of examples of cooperation between shia and sunni communities you know it's not what i think what people misunderstand so when you read see things in the media about cher and sunni and so on what people forget is that you forget the context in which these clashes are happening it's not as if cher and sunni are intrinsically a conflict what's happening here this is all under the cover of nationalism so there is you know so when you look at for instance and sometimes tribal tribal identity also features so we don't have the time when i could for example talk to you about iraq and you know the invasion of iraq you know has you know greece you know left all these tribal groups fighting each other and these tribal groups often manipulated sectarian identity to attain power so it's not just about i would say it's not just about sectarianism as much as it is about a nationalism that has just imploded and tribes various tribes are actually fighting to redefine themselves not as nations but units at a bigger than a because they see the nation state is a product of colonialism and so they are using other symbols so isis is a isn't wonderful example of that that they are a group that is undermining the national structures of iraq and syria and so on they want to do away with nationalism they they are supposedly sunni right but the way they treat share and other minorities is not the traditional sunni way of dealing with minorities right across it is they come it doesn't represent the sunni tradition and i'm very clear about that so i don't see them even though they they use certain religious language one has to understand them as you know grounded in a certain political context and they're using i think you know in a certain way i think about how politicians in this country manipulate religion for political gains to get support from people and for me this is not a very different phenomena that you're seeing of course the extremes you know that people are doing but this is part of the ways in which religions get manipulated but i don't think we should think about it that these are centuries long conflicts because it's a very simplistic way of trying to understand the tradition the history of a religious tradition you have to put things into context and with things are happening and why they're happening so why is it that  intermarried their families and so on why is it all of sudden become a problem if this if this was intrinsically about religion this would have been a long issue a long time ago why is this popped up now it's definitely do have to do with the current political situation and political groups manipulating religious identity for their own benefit  and i would basically echo the same thing i mean we don't have for the most part those tensions between sunni and shia and the us i think a good parallel to think about would be if we think about the so called religious tensions in northern ireland between catholics and protestants right that's not actually a religious conflict but a political rift and as professor sanyal was noting you know differences in school have been used cynically by some some very  horrific dictators at times to play groups off one another or to oppressed minorities majorities in many cases and to hold on to power and we and we can train one another's mosque there are certain times when you know there's certain holidays that for example i'm just curious about the background of the resistance you receive from the obama administration to this local initiative what do you think is driving that what's what's happened could you give us a little history of that i'm not sure how little i can make it but i'll try the countering violent extremism program that you're asking about it's not new and spend around in the u k for about a decade and it it's basically a manifestation of this flawed theory that radicalization or extremism is what causes people to commit political violence which again is a convenient theory if we want to ignore the bigger context of conflict of armed conflict that includes state inflicted violence right and also includes even strategic decisions by armed groups instead this radicalization theory really encourages us to focus on individuals mindsets and pathologies individuals mindsets unsafe people commit political violence it's because they're crazy and we don't have to look at what the law is and therefore we don't have to look at how our behavior has some interplay with in terms of the response from the obama administration to our concerns and we have spoken many times with the u s attorney's office which is one of the agencies leading the program here on the department of homeland security and others you know i can't i can't presume to understand everyone's motivations i think there's a number of motivations and i'm not sure how many people who are involved in deploying this actually believe that the program is effective and how much it is rather a response to the pressure that they are getting from some very extreme groups on the right that say you need to do something about muslims unfortunately the program is likely to inflict serious harm and of the answered if i can just add one there is a book that i've just finished reading it's written by a and really traces these groups put pressure on the government so the lobby groups in the united states well funded lobby groups that are putting pressure on the government to do something about the muslim problem and these these groups used to be french and now they become mainstream so this book is it's a social logical study and it shows you how this network is influencing stuff you know state legislatures how it's influencing federal government f b i the their influence pervasive and so one of the things that i think you know we really need to do is to is to deal with this group which is which is sort of monopolizing how the government and state institutions are thinking about muslims because that's the worst that seems to be the loudest and it's getting the most attention and people need to be able to say you know there are other ways to think you should be listening to it one other for your reading list very quickly it's really very readable book as well talks about the evolution of these policies you know backers of like to a ship of focus just for a moment from geopolitical back to kind of personal and it's just wondering as each of you as a muslim in america is there like one question that you would really like to have non muslims ask you and is there one question that you would just love to live your life without hearing put you on the spot first i don't think there is any such thing i am willing to answer any question that but you know i have as i said i've been doing this for forty years and i've been to all kinds of places and i've been to some extremely aggressive jewish temples i've been to a christian college so you know you you face all kinds of questions is there one that you hear most often they're all the same basically i think when one of the questions which is often asked and we haven't asked here is where are the muslim weiss's why don't you speak up why don't you condemn and if it's interesting because you know then i can turn ionized you why don't you condemn the mourner that was committed last night by somebody you know that was a christian person why didn't you why didn't you condemn that so if i have nothing to do with what's going on i mean and you know i don't even consider that follower of my faith because they don't do anything that belongs to my feet so why should i be defending them or you know condemning them or doing anything i want nothing to do with them but i think so i always find this issue about why don't muslims speak out and my sense is that muslims are speaking out but you're not listening or you can't hear them and why can't you hear them that is the question why aren't you hearing the muslims who are speaking out so that is the question that i like to pose people why aren't you hearing the muslims and the question that that  m the other question that i always get asked is about women and yes like in any other religious tradition there are instances of oppression of women patriarchy all those things but you know there are also instances of women muslim women who are very comfortable being muslim and they think islam is a tradition that doesn't discriminate against elected twice in in a muslim majority country the fact that she was a woman was not a big deal she got elected twice as prime minister and she gave a speech at harvard couple of you know y several years before she was assassinated she said it's not islam which discriminate against women it is m cringe about and feel like oh maybe that was a sensitive question to silent for worry of putting your foot in your mouth because genuinely people can can sense your good intentions but i would second what you said about questions about muslim especially for myself i often get asked to speak on panels about women in islam or women and islam you know my response to that is usually along the lines of well let's think a little bit more creatively about how we could  it's the other question that i really don't appreciate because i don't think it's coming from a good place is what's your solution and i'll give context to that we hear that question when we speak with federal law enforcement about our concerns about  and they say well what's your solution and of course the problem in that in that question the unspoken problem to which the solution needs to be proposed is what's your solution to the muslim question we wish people could ask rather and i think what i would love for people to ask is how can we work together in a way that is not just window dressing not just feel good photo opportunities but really allied together for real social justice and that's another reason why i'm really grateful to be here today because i feel like the entire framing of this is asking and it's about that question  this what question i would wish people ask me about what role do the arts play in how muslims experience their religion because  somebody who teaches about islam i am convinced that as in most religious traditions the arts play a very important role in how people experience religion so think about in a synagogue or in a church you have a choir and your beautiful architecture that's all part of the religious experience and similarly in the slummy tradition the sonic and visual and literally settings that you appreciate and you understand and most people don't even know about that and so i think that when you start and i teach a course at harvard on islam to the art that what would this tradition look like if you approach it through the aesthetics and you get a very different image of the tradition then when you approach it from a political anchor right it's the lens that you're using and i wish that more people were aware of the artistic and this headache and the beauty that the central ety of puti in the in the tradition there's a saying of the prophet mohammed which says god is a beautiful and laos beauty and that saying has informed a lot of traditions of in the muslim world which many non muslims are not even aware of thank you i think we have time for one more question yes  i very much appreciate your coming and the more you speak the more i realize that you are very much like me as a jew i experience the world around me in similar ways and it seems that what i'm subject to is the way that the media portrays muslims that i hear over and over and over again the same message and so i get to internalize that and it's painful and it's poisonous to me but i'll go out on a limb here in addition it seems when the united states or other first world countries are oppressing people around the world we don't think about it we don't say anything but when white people are attacked all of a sudden we go after somebody and in this case it's you before it was the jews before it was the black people had written and they come yeah very important question i think this issue about knowledge how do you know what you know about islam how do you know what you know about islam what are your sources of information and if you're relying just on the media that's a problem  because remember the media is yes they're giving information but most media are commercial ventures they're out to make money they're driven by economics and they're interested in selling things so one has to be very careful and i also tell you know some of my muslim compadres you know when they say things about jews and christians because they've never actually studied the tradition they don't know the history they don't or even western culture they've not you know they're not familiar with the music and the philosophy and the ethics and the grandeur of the tradition that just it's just depends on what's on the media and the movies and the think america is like this and so on say how do you know what you know about america it's all about knowledge construction and your sources of information and this goes back to this issue of education and the clash of ignorances because our constructions of islam or america or whatever it is are seriously flawed i would add to that the internet the information you receive from internet is flawed more often than not to be very careful  is nine o'clock i want to thank you all very much i certainly want to thinkers team an they have been gracious enough to themselves of us after this so please feel free to mingle a little bit afterwards a couple of quick announcements before i release you if this has stimulated you to act further as was spoken earlier over there at the entranceway there is a table with a sign up sheet for anyone interested in a future at the arlington you you church has information and sign up sheet number to a listening in planning event to promote civil discourse  community engagement is part of a new stand up for kindness and decency campaign will be held at seven pm next tuesday at the unitarian church here in belmont and katherine is here some work raise your hand there she is  by the way is our hostess for the evening and the founder of the feast if it work and she can give you information about this event finally thursday april seventh at seven pm at the belmont public library the road to belmont stories of immigration as part of one book one belmont selection the boston girl and again this will be talking about integrators and immigration here in this country and again i want to thank belmont against racism the belmont human rights commission the belmont  the first church in belmont unitarian and the bethel temple sent a social action committee for hosting this evening again i do want to thank our esteemed guests here this evening my name is dr david alpert thank you for your attention and thank you belmont media who'll be sending this not only to our community not only to surrounding communities but have made it available throughout the country hopefully we're starting something here again thank you and have a good