By Kara Carrell

Langston Hughes says that America was never America to him. And in many ways, being a Blaxican (of Black and Mexican heritage) woman, I have felt the same. In talking with my friends, mostly young people leading diverse lifestyles across the country, I’ve found the question of what it means to be American - what it means to be patriotic - being asked over and over again. The questions persist despite traits and heritage, beyond minority and majority divisions.

Langston Hughes also says,

America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

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In the spring of 1995, during my sophomore year at the University of Illinois, I learned that I was going to win a leadership award that came with a $500 check. I called my friend Jeff Pinzino, who had graduated from Illinois the year before and was now suffering through a Master's program at the University of Chicago, and popped the following question: “How about seeing how far this money will take us in my Oldsmobile this summer?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. Back then, most of our conversations were about post-colonial literature, and I could tell that I had taken Jeff aback with a rather modernist question. But he recovered admirably. “Let’s go,” he said. No two ways to interpret that.

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“Has it really gotten this bad?” my wife said to me as we listened to NPR yesterday morning while getting ready for work.

Mara Liasson was interviewing a group of swing voters about their presidential leanings, and one of them said: “I don’t trust Osama."

Slight, deliberate pause. "I mean Obama.”

“It’s only one letter difference,” Mr. Fasano helpful explained.

Then he walked further down the path of prejudice: “His middle name is ‘Hussein.’ He comes from a Muslim family.”

You could almost hear him leaning into the microphone at this point. “It’s not right,” he scolded. “I fear for America if he comes in.”

I guess Mr. Fasano missed the part in Obama’s 2004 DNC speech when he talked about “the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes America has a place for him, too.”

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First in a series of Wednesday "Guest Blogs"

By Rabbi Or N. Rose

“Rabbi, what do you love about your religious tradition?” asked a young African American woman with gentle curiosity.

The question took me by surprise. I had come to this large urban public high school to participate in a panel discussion about religion and public life and was very concerned about interacting respectfully and modestly with the my fellow panelists—Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist—and with the diverse student body, teachers, and staff. While there is much about Judaism that I love, I did not want to stumble into a triumphalist discourse.

Further, as a progressive rabbi and academic I spend a great deal of time engaging in conversation about the thornier elements of my faith tradition—patriarchy, chauvinism, and the like—feeling that grappling with these difficult questions is crucial to fashioning an intellectually honest and ethically responsible Jewish life.

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Note to Readers of The Faith Divide: This week we will be launching two new features. One is a weekly guest writer, who will post on Wednesdays. The second is "The Bridge", which is a brief description of an individual, an activity or a story bridging the faith divide. I will continue to write twice a week, posting on Mondays and Fridays.
-- Eboo

A movement is a network of individuals and institutions making an idea reality.

Take the Green Movement, for example. The core idea is that the earth is precious and needs to be protected. That idea is put into practice by everyone from eight-year-old children who recycle to major companies who are desperately trying to perfect alternative fuels for human use.

Two weeks ago, about 75 leaders and stakeholders of the emerging interfaith youth movement gathered at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in an event co-organized by my organization, the Interfaith Youth Core, to discuss the shape and future of what we are about.

The core idea of our movement is simple: Religious diversity can either unite us or divide us, and the direction we go on this key issue will be largely determined by young people.

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Not long after the State Department revoked the Fulbright scholarships it had awarded to seven Palestinian students because they were not given permits to leave Gaza, I found myself sitting in Imam Yahya Hendi’s office at Georgetown University listening to his remarkably American story.

(At Secretary Rice’s insistence, the scholarships have been reinstated, but some of the students are still having trouble getting permission to leave).

An encounter with the Israeli Defense Forces in the West Bank town of Nablus when he was eight years old left Yahya with a mouth full of blood and curses.

His mother cleaned his wounds and then sharply rebuked him. “When you curse the Jews you curse yourself,” she said. “No son of mine will insult a Prophet or a people.”

That comment sent little Yahya to the Qur’an with questions about how Islam views other faiths. The answer, he discovered, was that his holy book viewed other religious communities with great reverence. (For more on this topic, read Dr. Umar Abd-Allah's excellent essay, One God, Many Names.)

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Most Muslim events are held in anonymous rooms in suburban hotels, silently sending the message that American Muslims ought not concern themselves with the great issues of our time and place. Much of the talk is about the old days in other places - Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, the Palestinian territories. Most of the talkers are aging men with long beards (“uncles”, we call them), first generation immigrants who tell long stories about pure places far away. Their identities were formed in those settings. Their memories of other times on distant shores are sweet.

And who can blame them? Every immigrant community – Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, Mexicans, Poles, Russians, Indians – knows this story. Who hasn’t heard granddad’s tales of the homeland?

In this narrative, America is a place to make a living. But to truly make a life, to genuinely follow your faith? For that, you have to be elsewhere.

The Zaytuna Institute – America’s first Muslim seminary – believes that both America and Islam will be poorer if American Muslims continue that narrative. So for their recent event in Chicago they chose a location which told a very different story – the magnificent Museum of Science and Industry, just blocks away from the University of Chicago. The message was clear – Muslims need to place themselves at the heart of what is happening here and now, to conceive of themselves as citizens who contribute to matters at the center of things, not people who pass through on the margins.

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“A child was born in Chicago today, and you could put on his birth certificate: + 35 years of life.”

Several thousand Evangelical arts programmers sat in the gargantuan main auditorium of Willow Creek Church and wondered where Brian McLaren was going with this.

McLaren leaned forward and said, “A child was born in Sierra Leone today, and here’s what you could put on that birth certificate: - 35 years of life.

“There is no difference in how much parents love their children anywhere in the world.”

Brian McLaren, a fellow On Faith contributor, has dedicated his life to making that child in Sierra Leone central to the life of the church.

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(Note to readers: Below I wrote that David Horowitz had recently done a talk at Dartmouth. I was mistaken. It was Robert Spencer, under the sponsorship of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. I regret the error.)

I chuckled to myself wondering what William F. Buckley, the author of the landmark conservative tract God and Man at Yale, might have thought of this year’s Baccalaureate Service at Dartmouth College. In addition to Christian hymns and Bible readings, there was a Native American prayer offered in the Yuchi language, and recitations from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

The main speaker – yours truly – was a Muslim.

One theme of Buckley’s classic work is that God should be at the center of people’s intellectual journeys, and therefore should play a far more significant role on campus. And when Buckley spoke of God at Yale, he meant the Protestant idea of God. (According to a recent New Yorker piece by George Packer, Buckley refused to promote David Brooks - now at The New York Times - past a certain stage at his National Review because he was not a "believing Christian".)

Buckley would be happy to know that religion is once again being taken seriously on college campuses, but one of the reasons is because of the diversity of traditions present. Jews, Catholics and Protestants have had an institutional presence on campuses for many years, and colleges (including Wellesley, Duke, Princeton, Brown and Georgetown) are increasingly hiring Muslim chaplains to minister to the growing numbers of Muslim students on campus. Dartmouth has all of the above, plus the first ZaZen Chaplain I’ve ever met on a college campus.

Dartmouth, like many other campuses, also has a staff person specifically devoted to organizing interfaith projects, in the recognition that fragmentation around faith too easily leads to dangerous division.

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Here is what the latest Gallup polling on religious attitudes tells us:

Most Christians want better relations between Christianity and Islam but believe most Muslims don't. Most Muslims want better relations but believe most Christians don't. Most Americans think most Muslims do not accept other religions. Actually most Muslims say they want greater and not lesser interaction between religions.

Reading that reminded me of the first stanza in William Stafford's poem, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other"

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

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Tony Blair has the chance to do for the interfaith movement what Al Gore has done for environmentalism: create a tipping point effect on one of the most important issues of the 21st century.

Similar to the environmental movement, there are a number of excellent interfaith organizations bringing people from different faith communities together to build understanding and serve the common good. And just as the combination of environmental catastrophes and new science has focused public attention on climate change, so has the combination of high-profile religious violence and studies about the surprising persistence of faith inspired people to ask big questions about the impact of religion on the world.

The interfaith movement has lacked what the environmental movement got in 2000 – the presence of a serious global leader willing to engage a serious issue in a serious way: framing debate, galvanizing energy, generating resources, pointing to a major win and convincing the world that we can get there.

Until now.

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A prominent Chicago CEO who heard me speak recently emailed me an article comparing ordinary Muslims today to ordinary Germans during the Nazi era. It states, “Very few people were true Nazis, but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care.” And the rest, of course, is history -- or today’s story, according to this way of thinking.

As the article continues: "We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.”

First of all, articles or authors that use the Nazis as a historical analogy should set off conspiracy-theory alarms everywhere. Anytime someone wants to convince you that some new threat is the next Nazism, they’re not even pretending to make a reasoned argument. They are relying on your fear to blind you into buying what they are selling. And what they are selling is usually bigotry.

The data shows that ordinary Muslims emphatically do not support Muslim extremists. As Fareed Zakaria writes in his recent Newsweek column, a 2007 ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan found support for the jihadists to be about 1 percent. In Pakistan’s North-West frontier, a region supposedly friendly to bin Laden and his cohorts, his support ran at about 4% in January 2008.

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MONTEZUMA, N.M. -- I’ve noticed that some of my friends with the highest commitment to international peacebuilding, and the most talent to bring to that challenge, have something profound in common: they attended a United World College for their last two years of high school.

So when I got the honor of being invited to do the Commencement Speech at the UWC in Montezuma, New Mexico (about an hour north of Santa Fe), I jumped at the chance to see one of the institutions up close.

I arrived in time for Blue Moon, the student performance event the night before Commencement. The President of the UWC, Linda Darling, sat next to me and told me the nationalities represented on stage during the various acts. The hammed-up performance of Thriller included students from well over a dozen countries. A Romanian girl and a boy from Hong Kong sang a Chinese pop song, accompanied by a Malaysian student on the piano. “How does the Romanian girl know how to sing in Chinese?” I asked President Darling. She just shrugged. Par for the course at this school.

(My favorite international moment of the evening occurred during the Bollywood dance, performed by young women from Nepal, Canada and Norway, all dressed in gorgeous Indian outfits. Just after the closing note of the song, a young man in the audience, in a fit of cross-cultural inspiration, audibly whispered, “Opa”.)

There are about eighty-five countries represented at the school of two hundred students, with 25% of the student body coming from the United States. It is one of a network of twelve UWC’s around the world (the thirteenth is set to open in Maastricht, the Netherlands next year), which graduate a total of 1500 students every year from over 120 countries. They are the most important product of the UWC mission statement, which reads: “UWC makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future.”

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I first met Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan three years ago at the Clinton Global Initiative, where we served on a panel together. My wife could not stop commenting on her radiant beauty. But what I found most striking about her was her intelligence. She used her few minutes on that panel to speak about three things in particular.

1) She cautioned people against using the term ‘Muslim extremist’. There are Muslims, she said, and then there are extremists. Muslims are guided by their tradition to be a people in the middle, a people of moderation. The extremists are violating that central principle. Do not give them the honor of the title, ‘Muslim’.

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The faculty, staff and trustees of Washington and Jefferson College burst into wild applause as the graduating class rounded the corner and made their way, clad in caps and gowns and ear-to-ear smiles, to their ceremony.

I stood next to the President of the College, Tori Haring-Smith, and watched as she greeted most of the 358 graduates by name. 25% were the first in their family to go to college. One kid stepped out of line to give President Haring-Smith a big hug. “He’s a championship tennis player,” she told me. He had one arm.

“This place is an institutionalization of the American dream,” Ron Pellegrini, class of 1959, said. He had to defer his admission to Washington and Jefferson and spend a year working in the coal mines because both of his parents had been laid off. When he finally got to campus he had to rush through in three years to save money. He has gone on to save lives, performing 15,000 open heart surgeries at the nearby University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. On the side, he is fundraising for a new science center at Washington and Jefferson.

American higher education is a magic escalator of opportunity, the heart of what this country is about. There is no greater honor than being invited to address the recent exponents of that dream – the graduates who are about to embark on the rest of their lives.

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For a minute, I thought I was reading the script for a late-night cable B movie. Aliens abduct a brilliant, charismatic American president, saying that he was once one of theirs before he treasonously defected to the other side. Despite heroic negotiation efforts by both his wife and his former opponent for the Presidency (gotta give Hillary a role somewhere), they successfully behead him in a giant stadium (think Gladiator), to the wild applause of their fellow blood-thirsty aliens.

When I realized that the aliens in the script were referred to as ‘Muslims’, I figured that perhaps this was an article on some right-wing, Muslim-hating blog. What those guys lack in credibility, they certainly make up for in imagination, I thought to myself. If their funding ever dries up, and they don’t mind doing a nude scene or two, they could work for Cinemax.

What I didn’t want to admit was that this article was in the national paper of record, supposedly the most prestigious platform for news and views in the world, the paper I’ve counted on to bring me intelligent perspectives on global affairs since I was twenty years old.

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There will be two commemorations this week in the Middle East. For Israelis, joy at the birth of their state. For Palestinians, sorrow for what they call the Naqba, or catastrophe.

And no doubt, all week, we will be reading the opinions of people on both sides. Each article will ask, implicitly or explicitly, which side are you on?

Consider these pieces in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, two views on the recent history of the region.

Saree Makdisi wrote:

“All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is that – after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories it occupied during the 1967 war – Israel has irreversibly cemented its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.”

And now the other side, by Benny Morris:

“(After December 2000) the Palestinians unleashed an open-ended terroristic assault on Israel, its restaurants and buses and marketplaces. For Israelis, each suicide bomber was a microcosm of what the Palestinians intended for the Jewish state as a whole.”

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Walter Lippman once said, "The way in which the world is imagined will determine at any given moment what men will do."

Think of that line as you watch the evening news or read the newspaper. The sad truth is that a large number of the images we see on a regular basis are about fear, mistrust and violence. Sometimes, those feel like the only possibilities.

Stories shape our lives and our societies. Extremists understand that very well. A few months ago, The Washington Post did an exceptional video news story on how Muslim extremists use film as a weapon in their war.

“Without the video, it’s just an attack,” details just how deliberate and strategic these groups are when it comes to using video. Murdering people is only one of their goals. Spreading the idea of Islam as a violent religion and convincing people that we are in a clash of civilizations is just as central to their agenda.

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I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read last week that Nelson Mandela was on the terrorism watch list.

At least Condeleeza Rice had the grace to call the situation “embarrassing”.

Daniel Pipes, who earns his living by making Americans scared of their Muslim neighbors, has no such decency.

I suppose there is a case to be made for a file to exist somewhere in the national security apparatus with the name “Mandela” on it. After all, he did co-found an organization, Spear of the Nation, that carried out violent actions as part of the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, albeit a half century ago.

When Pipes puts someone on one of his lists, it isn’t about what you did, however long ago. It is about who you are – especially if you are an Arab or a Muslim. The story of how he derailed Debbie Almontaser’s career is just the most recent egregious example.

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We host about two dozen international delegations every year at the Interfaith Youth Core - African journalists, Pakistani businesspeople, European activists, Central Asian religious leaders, the list is long and colorful.

They come to learn about the “American system”, and ask lots of questions about the Constitution, checks and balances, separation of powers – all the stuff of high school American history.

Those things are all necessary to understanding what America is about, I tell them. But they are far from sufficient. To really know America, I emphasize, you have to dig into the African-American tradition.

You have to know that a race of people who were enslaved and subjugated for centuries by America decided that instead of leaving this nation in disgust, they would create it anew.

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