This past weekend, 16 Wesleyan students took a step towards combating the mounting tensions between Muslim and Jewish citizens worldwide. Accompanied by Muslim Chaplain Abdullah Antepli, the group attended a conference in New York City to discuss Muslim and Jewish relations in North America.
The event was coordinated by Ben Magarik ’06, the house manager of the Bayit, and Joel Bhuiyan ’06, the house manager of Turath and the head of the Muslim Students Organization. Sponsored by Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel, a non-profit organization that encourages pluralism in the Jewish community in North America, the conference included people of all ages and stressed the similarities between the two faiths as a vehicle to achieve greater understanding.
The conference consisted of ten workshops focusing on issues from the reality of living in the diaspora to a discussion about justified and unjustified violence. Each workshop had two presenters. In addition, three group-wide lectures were distributed at the beginning, middle and end of the day.
“The presenters were really well prepared and they worked with each other really well,” said Magarik.
Opening with a Bet Midrash, a traditional form of Jewish study based upon close examination of texts, participants broke into small groups to discuss the intertextuality between Jewish and Islamic interpretations of the story of Abraham and Isaac.
“It was great,” said Bhuiyan. “We went directly to the Torah and the Koran and the story of Abraham which is so crucial to both religions.”
One of the key attributes of the conference was the deliberate exclusion of topics stemming from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I think why it was so productive was because we stayed away from Israel and Palestine,” Bhuiyan said. “It was mainly just discussing relations in North America.”
Both Bhuiyan and Magarik stressed that the strength of the conflict lay in the continual use of texts, and particularly the similarities between the texts, to attend to contemporary issues. For example, Bhuiyan attended a workshop that looked at the sanctity of life in Islam and Judaism in a way that related to suicide bombings.
“It was remarkable,” Bhuiyan said. “We went directly to the text and we saw that it’s almost exactly the same in the Torah and the Koran. There was one passage that says that if you save the life of one human being it’s like saving the whole world. And if you kill one innocent being it’s like killing all of mankind.”
Antepli explained that he feels that one of the pathways to peace is acknowledging and fully comprehending the multitude of similarities between Judaism and Islam.
“It’s extraordinary how much in common we have,” he said. “We have all the reasons not to fight and to work for peace.”
Antepli praised Magarik’s and Bhuiyan’s initiative in organizing Wesleyan participation in the conference as well as the conference itself that he described as “eye opening.” He thought a particular strength was the inclusion of practical suggestions that included looking at diversity within both populations as well as celebrating the separate cultures themselves as a way to increase the potential of peace.
Jewish Chaplain David Leipziger felt that, especially in light of the debate surrounding last weekend’s “Activism 102,” the conference in New York City highlighted the need for greater dialogue between different communities on campus and how well two different groups could work together.
“I’m not completely convinced the University puts an emphasis on this kind of project and I think that’s to our detriment,” he said. “We can either have private conversations on the faculty listserv, have students write Wespeaks, or we can actually sit in the same room and dialogue on a deeper level.”
All agreed that this conference would hopefully only be the first in a series of similar events.
“What happened on Sunday was a beginning and it has to be a part of something larger or else it was totally useless,” said attendee Tal Beery ’06. “I think to that extent it was very successful in whetting my appetite for this type of dialogue and progress outside of the Middle East.”
Magarik and Bhuiyan already are planning other activities to bring the two faiths together on campus, such as similar workshops at Wesleyan and cross-cultural cooking in one another’s kitchen. Bhuiyan felt that Turath’s move to its new location at One Vine Street would contribute to greater dialogue now that the two program houses will be closer together.
Antepli also hoped to increase the number of collaborative activities between the two groups, particularly because he is currently a graduate student in Christian-Muslim relations at the Hartford Seminary. He cites a summer, interfaith camp hosted by Wesleyan as another on-campus possibility. According to Antepli, the students who attended seemed encouraged by the conference.
“You should have seen everyone on the way back,” he said. “Everybody was so excited.”
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